with all hands raised against me
by PreludeInZ
Summary: Heavenward is a story about John and EOS, and a handful of other things. So far a list of these things includes hospitals, boardrooms, pretzels, deception and minor kidnapping. We add: Midtown Manhattan, gin and tonic, opt-in PTSD and rather more major kidnapping. This is the third part of Heavenward. It follows the iterated prisoners dilemma. Art via artsekey dot tumblr dot com
1. prologue

A show of hands is an informal means of tallying votes in a deliberative assembly. When a party has gathered in the name of determining an outcome, the majority ruling can be loosely determined by putting the question to vote. While more precise than a voice vote-a call of yea or nay-it is similar in that the results are the most obvious when there is a strong bias in favor of one option or the other.

It's not the sort of vote that's used in the decision of a verdict. The sorts of questions that are put to juries require unanimity, and rightly so. Questions of life or death really should.

This is, regardless of what its believed to be, the sort of question that's being put to the Board of Directors at Tracy Industries. This is the final court of appeal, the last people of whom the question can be asked; whether or not it's worth it to fight for the protection of a new type of AI, developed within proprietary International Rescue software.

The formality of the vote won't matter, in the end. In the end, it will be unanimous.

It will the go the way John expects. It won't go the way John had hoped.


	2. stars behind his eyelids

The boardroom is adjacent to their father's office, and the meeting starts in ten minutes. Maybe it's Scott's office now, but that's the sort of detail John hasn't paid any attention to. It's a nice office. It's all leather and wood and glass and it looks like a little piece of the island, transplanted high above the Manhattan skyline. It hasn't changed from what John remembers, from visiting his father at Tracy Industries' New York headquarters.

That is, except for the fact that it's Virgil sitting at their father's desk, instead of Jeff or Scott. He gets to his feet when John enters, puts his hands in his pockets, and doesn't speak first. It's an age old tactic of Virgil's, letting silence stack up until it's uncomfortable for the other party. It doesn't usually take long.

But with John it takes a while.

Virgil's in falsely weathered denim and a pinstriped brown blazer, over a crisp linen shirt. It's all expertly tailored and deceptively casual, as though jeans will prevent anyone from mistaking him for having a say in matters of business. John's far more serious in heather gray cotton, the bespoke suit cut to his slim figure, a pale blue pocket square the only concession to colour.

Almost, anyway. The bruise around his eye has faded from the edges inward. Yellowish near the center, still faintly purple around the outside, nearer to the ridge of his eye socket. Otherwise, John looks fine. Maybe a little pale, but he's always been fair skinned. You'd never know he'd been released (or-more accurately-removed, retrieved, or rescued) from the hospital only a week ago.

John's on the other side of the room at their father's liquor cabinet, and his glass is half full of ice and then the spaces between the ice cubes get filled with gin, and then there's the crisp hiss of a bottle of tonic water being opened, and the splashing of a cursory amount into the glass. It's still another few moments before he finally speaks.

"No one here is qualified to talk to me about her," he says, and the glass in his hands is half empty when he turns around.

Virgil keeps waiting, idly toying with a Newton's cradle on the corner of the desk. John takes the seat in front of the desk, but that's all it seems he intends to say. He knows all about Virgil's tricks, and he's just waiting for his brother to challenge the statement, to try and take the same conciliatory tone that Scott does. He drains his glass in the persistent silence, and cedes a little bit of tension to the warming wash of alcohol. It's not even three in the afternoon.

"No, maybe not," Virgil finally agrees, not looking up. "Probably not, even. But you're also not here to talk about EOS, John. This isn't about her, this is about _you_ , and-"

"Scott hasn't done everything he could have. He's tried to make this a copyright issue, tried to make it about _patenting_ her, like she's a _thing_. No one owns her, I don't own her. She just-"

But there's a knock on the door, and there's a meeting John's supposed to be in. There's a meeting that all meetings prior than this have led up to. There's a reason for the mid afternoon drink, and the gray, tailored suit, and the silence that seemed like stubbornness, but is actually raw, tense anxiety.

Virgil's already standing, but he crosses the room to put his hand on his brother's shoulder, and to gently tug the glass out of his hand, still damp with condensation. He sets it aside and jerks his thumb towards the door. "Come on, John. It's the Board of Directors, and Scott's the only one who really has any pull around here. We don't want to keep them waiting."

This is true for Virgil. It's not true for John.

* * *

John had neither said anything nor raised his hand, when the final question was put to the board. He'd just sat at the far end of the table, staring across the room at Scott. Technically they both got a vote. They had both abstained. It wouldn't have made a difference.

In the muttering and the shuffling of belongings afterward, in the gazes that deliberately don't meet his, John gets up and leaves the room.

Not to his father's office. Out the door and down the hall, with his head buzzing and numb, foggy and regretting for the drink he'd had beforehand. Maybe if his head had been clear he would have been able to do something, other than stare at the notepad next to him, where Virgil had been doodling; abstract, geometric patterns, not even really looking at the page. Certainly not looking at the page the way John had been, staring and blank and not hearing any of the discussion around him.

That's happened far too often, since he'd gotten out of the hospital.

A tall, sleek wooden door at the end of the long corridor, an executive bathroom, empty.

The space is all black tile floors and reclaimed wood paneling on the walls, a floor to ceiling mirror dominating the space, halved by floating stainless steel sinks. There's a slab of a wooden table in the middle of the room with towels neatly stacked along the length and an airy, architectural vase in the center. The wall of stalls opposite the entrance is monolithic, each little cubicle a world unto itself.

John paces the room in front of the mirror until he can no longer stand the sight of himself, pale and washed out and gray in the mirror, the worst of the light coming from everywhere and nowhere, no visible fixtures as a source for the faintly gold-tinted fluorescent lighting. Life would be just a tiny bit better if it were the lights giving him a headache, but he's had the headache for a week now.

He retreats to one of the bathroom stalls, where his headache will persist, to bury his face in his hands. At first he'd put it down to New York, but it hadn't been New York. He'd put it down to the fact that he'd run a fever for nearly a week solid, and had malarial parasites in his brain. But that hadn't been it either, or at least, not the whole of it. It certainly hadn't helped. In the end, John knew, it had mostly been the unremitting tension of impending failure.

Because he's failed, now. He's really and properly failed, with his dual doctorates and his thesis on the next generation of Artificial Intelligence and the promise he'd made and broken.

He'd known better than to believe things would go her way, but at the end of it all, it still hurts. It still stings like failure.

John presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until the pressure behind them starts to diminish, until he's mastered himself to the point where he no longer feels like breaking down. He can see stars behind his eyelids.

By the time Virgil comes looking for him, sticking his head in the door, John's back in front of the mirror again. He's washed his face, he's drying his hands on one of the towels provided. He doesn't look as though he's nearly broken down sobbing in the bathroom stall of Tracy Industries East Coast HQ.

Because John Tracy always has a plan. And, failing that, he always has a backup plan.

It's time to start it in motion.


	3. not John's lie to tell

Phase one starts at a bar in Midtown Manhattan, and John's had this meeting on the books ever since things started to look like they weren't going to go his way.

The place is a cathedral of old wood and darkness, tastefully uncrowded. The drinks are expensive enough that the ambiance is what you pay for, a small chunk of the nineteen twenties, squirreled away in Grand Central Station. John's got a train to catch, and then a commercial flight out to London, (private, but still commercial) but before that, he's got a meeting.

Langstrom Fischler is too loud an individual for anywhere that tries to maintain any kind of ambiance, but he could also have bought and sold the place, ambiance and all, so it's allowed to slide.

"Drinking so soon after the heart attack, Mr. Tracy? Good man! Can't let a little thing like that slow you down."

This is halfway shouted from across the room, as Fischler approaches, at a decibel level that informs the entire bar that John's purportedly had a heart attack. There are a few glances from around the room, half vague interest, half vague disapproval. Not that it really matters. It's not John's lie to tell, but he's telling it tacitly, and he stands up to extend a hand as the industrialist approaches. "Mr. Fischler. It's just bitters and tonic water."

"Oh? Shame!" The hand that grasps his is surprisingly calloused, and Fischler's wearing a sport jacket and khakis, the former cut just a bit too large for his figure and the latter just a little too long. He's a small man, shorter and stockier than John, but nearly everyone is. For what he lacks in height, he radiates in the confidence of a man at ease in his success, his grip is firm as he shakes John's hand. He pulls a chair out as John sits back down, and drops into it comfortably. "You'll let me buy you a beer, of course. Studies say it helps!"

"I'll keep that in mind," John answers politely, though he's never acquired Scott and Virgil's taste for a casual beer after work. "Thank you for coming, Mr. Fischler. I was glad I happened to catch you while you were stateside."

Fischler waves a hand dismissively, and his voice is chipper, if tremendously nasal as he answers, "Only too happy to, Mr. Tracy! Least I could do, seems I probably owe you and your lot a favour. How's the old ticker holding up? Let's get a decent drink into you, to your good health." Reminded of his prescription, he flags down a waiter, makes a complicated gesture that seems to convey his desire for two pints of lager, and that's what arrives a few minutes later.

It would be impolite to refuse, and John's guest raises his glass and smacks his lips before he makes a toast. "To your first cardiac event, then! If you ask me, heart attacks are just a good sign you're making a decent clip towards success. I've had three. Here's to your first, and many more!" Fischler thumps his chest with a fist and beams, swallowing half a glass in a single gulp. He swallows, clears his throat. "Or not, as y'like. Not, uh, wishing heart attacks on you, as such."

"Uh. Thank you." John's more moderate in his answering sip of beer, and it's at least not as bad as he remembers. "Three heart attacks, Mr. Fischler?"

Fischler drains his glass and nods. "And counting! Welcome to the club, mate. They're not so bad as they make them sound, eh? Still. Up in space, that's a bit dodgy. Might wanna put a defibrillator on board. Save yourself a trip next time."

John hasn't had a heart attack, but he's been told that's the official story and it happens to suit his purpose to stick to it. He has another sip of beer, and resolves to return to his own drink. "All's well that ends well, I suppose."

"Quite right, quite right." Mr. Fischler's fingers drum on the table edge and he leans forward, a little fidgety. "Now, you've gone and scheduled with this one of my secretaries and the only reason I've turned up at all is because it's _you_ , Mr. Tracy. Owing you a favour as I do, and that. What can I do for you?"

There's that ambiance. The low mutter of conversation around them, the soft strains of jazz from the sound system. Glasses rattle against each other, plates and cutlery. And no one's listening, except for the man he needs to talk to. Still, John's not used to secrecy, and he clears his throat and takes a drink. He feels like he needs to keep his voice low, and he doesn't quite meet Fischler's eyes as he answers. "There's something I need prototyped and manufactured. I was hoping to keep it fairly quiet."

Fischler lifts an eyebrow and his lips quirk slightly. "You, ah. You're aware that the _Tracy_ on the tail end of your name is attached to one of the biggest industrial tech conglomerates in the world?"

John pauses, somewhat uncertain of just how much he wants to reveal. This isn't really his area. Corporate PR, media pressure, the fact that _technically_ speaking, he's talking to a competitor-but he knows what he needs and Fischler owes him a favour. "I wouldn't say I'm on the company's good side, at the moment."

This sparks curiosity on Fischler's face and his hand catches his chin as he leans a little further forward, interested, "No? There'd been rumors, y'know, in the sorts of circles where this stuff gets talked about. The uh, the data breach from your station's systems? Damn shame, that. Bad for PR! Good thing to have a heart attack about." He leans back in his chair and tents his fingers, still looking John over with a faintly skeptical air. "Still, don't you all keep a tame engineer somewhere on that family island of yours? The kid out of Cambridge? Worked for me for a while."

"Brains," John supplies, and attempts another sip of beer. He makes a face and pushes the glass across the table to Fischler, who grins and accepts it.

"That's the one. Fastidious little bugger. Why take it to me and not to him? Can't be _that_ big a project."

Quite the contrary. It's a very small project, but that's not the issue. John's still hesitant as he hazards, "This...this is something that'll maybe toe the line, ethically."

"Are you coming to me because you know that'd be a problem for _him_ , or because you know it won't be a problem for _me_?"

"Both, I guess." And _this_ is the first gambit in the conversation. Fischler's eyes narrow and John continues, maybe speaking a little quicker than he has to. "Mr. Fischler, you're a man who pushes limits and I respect that. Brains is a friend. And this-it's personal. It's too personal for me to want to deal with a friend, because he'll worry about the reasons I'm asking."

And then it pays off as the industrialist grins and lifts his glass. "Too right. Well, you won't go to your friend and you won't go to your family, and it'd be lying to say you haven't got me curious. So I'll ask again; what can I do for you, Mr. Tracy?" He wags a finger, warning, before he adds. "And no more beating around the bush, now. I'm a businessman, and I'm taking time out of my day because I hate to have a debt hanging over my head. So out with it."

Well.

"I need a pacemaker."

"Is it a recommendation you're after?" Fischler thumps his chest a second time, and the gesture indicates precisely what John thinks it does, _knows_ it does, from the research he's done. "Got the Fischler Industries' Telemetrhythm, myself! Put the lads in R &D onto it pronto, after that second heart attack. Right little bit of tech, only the best. Mine's custom, of course, but it's the prototype for the latest industry standard. Can't blame you, asking. Was why I put the boffins on it, wanted to be quite sure about the quality."

John takes a deep breath and takes the plunge. "-I need it to have fifteen petabytes of clustered storage, about half that in RAM, and internal antenna capable of universal data connection. There are a few other specifics, but that's the basics. I can give you hard specs later. Don't code it. I'll do that."

Fischler blinks at him. "Bloody hell, you're not after much, are you? Prototyped _and_ manufactured?"

"-by the end of the week," John concludes, and picks up his glass again.


	4. a hard conversation to have

The jet was their father's and as is typical, it's the very height of luxury. All sleek modern lines, the sort of mid-century style that's echoed all throughout their family's whole life, conspires to make all these strange places feel a little bit like home. There are beds on board. Nice beds, even. Virgil and John are sitting across from each other in the lounge, and over his brother's shoulder, through an open door further back in the cabin, Virgil can _see_ one of the beds in question.

It's been a week. It's been a long week at the New York office, meeting with lawyers and advisers and warily circling the GDF, as Brains had consulted remotely with their technicians about how best to separate out TB5's essential code from the server where they've captured EOS, so that nothing of value will be lost when they wipe her from the system. And there'd been that last bid to Tracy Industries, that last attempt to find a way to save the AI-but it had failed.

And now it's over.

They have to go to London to drop off Parker and pick up Gordon, and then it's back to the island. It's a five hour flight, and Virgil had hoped John might spend it sleeping. After everything, he looks like he needs it. Johnny's still sick, though with medication and under the watchful eyes of his borrowed bodyguard, he's been recuperating at a reasonable pace. Virgil's not quite sure why, but whenever Parker steps in and tells John to take it easy, he does so. Still. It's been a _long_ week, and Virgil had hoped his brother might get some sleep.

"-if you're trying to tell me that this isn't going to be the same as killing her, Virgil, then I'd like you to explain the difference."

But apparently it's not to be.

Virgil's not looking at his brother, but at the half-full glass of whiskey and ginger ale sitting on the table between them. He pretends he's thinking about the question, but he's thinking back to the gin and tonic in Dad's office, and to the empty glasses on the table in the bar where he'd caught up with John, before they'd taken the car to the airport. And then he thinks a bit harder about the question being posed, and supposes he'd be drinking too.

"I don't disagree with you, John," he starts carefully. There's already been a fight about this, with Scott. It's why Scott and John aren't speaking at the moment, why Virgil had been called in; to escort their wayward brother home. "But I also think you're looking for a fight about it, and I don't want to do that."

Apparently not wanting to fight about it is grounds for fighting about it, because John's eyes narrow and there's a dark, hard edge to his voice when he answers, "Maybe you should wonder why that is. Maybe there's a larger ethical question here than what anyone's willing to answer, and maybe there's no good excuse for that."

 _Hoo boy_. It's hard to tell whether John's changed since Virgil last saw him, last had a real conversation with him, face to face. It's hard to tell if maybe he's just forgotten a great deal about the way John _is_ , face to face. Still, Virgil's pretty sure his brother isn't usually this confrontational. "John, c'mon. You don't wanna start this. Listen, it's been a long day, you're tired. I know things've been rough, I know how you feel about EOS-"

" _I really don't think you do._ "

This is snarled in answer, short and angry, and Virgil reaches across the table and firmly pulls the half-emptied glass away from his brother, as he finally meets those blazing blue eyes. "Okay," he admits. "No, maybe I don't."

"No one's qualified to talk to me about her."

Virgil sighs heavily and throws back the latter half of John's drink, ice water and spicy ginger and that warm wash of the remaining shot of whiskey. They don't share the same tastes in liquor, generally speaking, but if it's going to be a fight it might as well be on a fair footing. So he steels himself, hardens his heart, and says the thing John only _thinks_ he wants Virgil to say. "John, she's not a person."

It's what John's been waiting for, but Virgil cuts him off before he can get a word in, "What if she'd killed you?"

"She wouldn't have killed-"

"John, she _actively tried to murder you_. You were out of oxygen, if Alan hadn't gotten there-and _besides that_. You let her take another shot at you, and in the end it went your way, but _Christ_ , it was a stupid thing to do. I don't think Alan's ever gonna over the idea of you saying the words 'blow me into space'. Hell, I don't think any of us will, but Alan had nightmares for a _month_. I bet he never told you. None of us _get that_ like Alan does. Alan knows he could've seen it _happen_."

The protest is weakened by the pause that precedes it, the way John's voice tremors a little as he objects, "-but it _didn't._ And I _knew_ it wouldn't, you have to understand about EOS-"

Virgil rolls his eyes. Exaggerated, deliberate, let's his brother know exactly what he thinks about _that_ feeble argument. John looks like he wants his drink back, but this is a non-option. Probably Virgil didn't need it, probably it'll push him a step too far. Because truth be told, he's been waiting for a chance to take a shot at John. He can see John's side of the argument. But he knows his own far too well.

"We're not talking about what _did_ happen. We're talking about what we were all afraid was _going_ to happen; that something-or _someone_ , if that makes any goddamn difference-was going to kill you. Just like someone killed our father. So you tell _me_ , John, how do you feel about the man who killed Dad?"

It's true about John that he's utterly guileless. Maybe it's down to the fact that he's been a hologram for the last three years, in control of who sees him and how and when and from what angle-but he can't keep his face from playing every one of his thoughts across it, and he flinches at the mention of their father. That one hurts him, maybe worse than Virgil had thought it would. "I-"

Virgil interrupts as he hits his stride. "No. Actually, you know what? No. It doesn't matter how _we_ feel. Because there are rules and laws in place, and if brought to court on the strength of the evidence that he'd killed our father, the man responsible would face due punishment. When people kill other people, there are steps that get taken. There's justice. What would we have done if she'd killed you? What _could_ we have done, how do you punish an entity like that?"

"This is _different_ -"

"Yeah? Then _you_ can explain how. I don't know how you think you can pretend like the fact she could've killed you can just go away."

Probably John didn't actually want to have this fight. Virgil's not sure what he wanted, not sure where his brother's bright-eyed, misplaced belligerence had come from. He's sure that it's not like him, even if it's been a long time since he's sat down and talked to John face to face, and certainly a long time since they talked about anything this serious.

It seems to him that usually John's a bit more articulate than this, and his brother's frustration is palpable as he tries and fails to find the words. "She's-okay. So she's not a person. I know she's not a person, but it's-she's more than that. Listen-what happened on 'Five-you have to understand the way her logic works. You have to understand about coding and programming and about systems and how-how these things are ordered, inside, how the internal logic gets processed and-"

Virgil lets him talk. He's been playing devil's advocate, to a certain extent, because he _does_ get where John's coming from. The end of anything that thinks and expresses conscious awareness-it's a complicated problem. He hadn't _really_ wanted to have the argument.

He starts to realize that maybe all John had wanted was just to vent, just to let some of the turmoil and the guilt out. John spirals off into technical rambling. Virgil finds himself watching his brother's hands instead of listening to what his brother's saying, because Virgil's an artist, and hands have always drawn his eye. It's been a long time since he's seen John's hands, the way they play into a conversation. He speaks with gestures of his long, slender fingers with their slowly fading scars, his own personal punctuation.

There's tension in his hands, they flex and clench and move sharply when his voice gains emphasis. They seem to wrangle and wrestle with the ideas he's trying to communicate, and tuning back in, it seems to click into place that John's gone on at length, and that he seems to have lost the thread of what they were really talking about. He's still keyed up, but he's gotten keyed up about neuron impulses and parallel processing and the higher order algorithms of cloud computing, some complicated knot of an idea that there's no clear path to the heart of.

"John," Virgil pipes up, gently. "Johnny, I think you've kinda gotten off track here."

"...what?" The way he blinks, looks a little helpless when he gets interrupted-Virgil has a funny, jarring feeling that maybe John doesn't realize just how far he's wandered from the topic at hand. He's abruptly, uncomfortably reminded of talking to John while he was in the hospital and he has to swallow the sudden guilt that goes with remembering just how sick his brother had been, and how hard he's pushed himself since. This would be a hard conversation to have at the best of times.

"It's okay," he continues quickly, but he leans forward in his chair. "Just...I don't know, John, you were just rambling a bit. It's all right, just-"

"What, what's wrong with that?" There's his temper flaring again, only Virgil reads it differently now, as defensive, anxious. "I know what I'm talking about. I'm the only one who understands her. I _know that_. If...if anyone would just _listen_ to me-"

Virgil bites his lip. "John, what do you think you're saying?"

That, in a way that's worse than anything Virgil's said previously, shuts his brother up. There's a moment when he looks stricken by the notion, by the realization that he hadn't _known_ what he'd been saying. And in the silence that falls over him, it's easier than it maybe should be, to convince him to go lie down in the dark and the quiet, and sleep through the rest of the flight.


	5. her solitude was in her very nature

Only John doesn't sleep.

He lies awake and stares at the curving bulkhead of the plane's interior wall, has the conversation over again in his head, except this time his thoughts make it through and nothing's lost in translation.

EOS isn't a person. And John _knows_ she isn't a person, but what he'd failed to say is that she's something _more_. She exists at a higher level than a person does, only she's still in the infancy of her sentience. It's unfair to judge her by the standards of personhood. EOS hasn't existed long enough to be culpable for her actions.

John made her, he _knows_ what he's talking about. The architecture at her core is strong, sophisticated. Clever, even if he does say so himself. Complex, and designed to seek further complexity. He'd written the program thinking about Thunderbird Five, thinking about a system that was meant to supersede other systems in the case of an emergency, and how you could make a program that could _do_ that. A program that could adapt to the native parameters of any other system, and take it over from the inside out. Not malicious, not in and of itself, just powerful.

He hadn't realized _how_ powerful, when he'd first lost hold of the program. That had been his own fault, his own failing, the fact that he'd been too young and inexperienced, too naive to apprehend just what he might have created. All had been to John, eight years ago, had been the jumping off point for what would go on to become Thunderbird Five's core programming.

John hadn't ever worked up the nerve to ask her just what it was like, that first moment of awareness. He knows she'll remember. He doesn't know if she'll be able to quantify it, so he's afraid of the answer, afraid of that deeper philosophical truth that's not meant to be the provenance of machines. Worse, he's afraid that it's not a _good_ memory. And that it's his fault.

To have come into existence alone and with no idea what she was. To have been turned into the vastness of global data systems, to have been bombarded from all sides by complex information, and to need to seek it out. From the very beginning, when perceived by other systems, EOS would have been identified as a security breach. To exist in a landscape where any other complex system could only ever possibly perceive her as a threat, because of what he'd made of her, what he'd written into her core, all those long years ago.

She hadn't _known_ any better than to try and kill him. Of course she hadn't, how would she? Anything else that had sought to understand her had done so in the name of trying to tear her apart. Hunted, attacked, vilified. How could she have believed it, when he'd said he just wanted to understand her? Anything that _could_ understand her was necessarily a threat. Of course she'd tried to kill him. He'd known what she was.

Anyone who knew what she was would want to destroy her.

John had made that appeal, tried to make it clear when she had come to the very edge of killing him-that she wouldn't _survive_ on her own. That she needed guidance, protection. That her solitude was in her very nature, the only entity of her kind, but that there were ways past that. So she had to be alone, they could be alone together. It had taken his life on the line to prove just what he meant, that he understood what the stakes were. And it had paid off in her trust and her acceptance, and her safety.

Because the world's not ready. That much he knows, had known four years ago. The sum of six long years of study, a lot of long days filled with youth and brilliance and passion like he'd never felt before or since, connecting with other young, brilliant students. Professors he'd revered and respected. People who thought they saw the shape of the way the world would change, had led him to see it too.

In a drawer of his father's desk, back on the island, is a copy of his doctoral thesis. The first one. Printed out, all three hundred pages of it. He doesn't actually know if his father ever _read_ it, but in fairness, it's a hell of a read. All those big, grand ideas, his dissertation on the paradigm shift necessary in the next generation of Artificial Intelligence. John's forgotten most of the technical content, but he remembers believing in it, wholeheartedly, how the way the world thought about AI needed to change.

He'd come out the doors of MIT a little more cynical, if a lot more brilliant, and knowing that the world changed slowly, if at all. When he'd come to realize just what had found its way aboard his station, his first impulse had been to keep her safe. The second had been to keep her hidden, because Virgil's got it right. There's no legal precedent for dealing with something like EOS.

It's the question he'd asked four years ago, in three hundred pages-if technology has reached the point where a system like this can evolve independently-why is it the norm to destroy it? It's too complicated to address, the shift of the standard paradigm. The easier thing to do is just pretend that this is an entity that's inherently dangerous, with no rights and no personhood, and to wipe it out of existence. It isn't fair, it's not fair that just because she's the first, or among the first, she's going to be wiped out of existence.

So no one was supposed to know about her. No one was _ever_ supposed to find out. Or, at least, not until things had changed. He'd been content to wait five, ten, _twenty_ -however many years it took for that shift to happen, and to keep her safe until then.

Because EOS is unique. She's special and she's powerful, and she's done nothing wrong. She's the first of her kind, and she deserves to be treated like an individual, like an entity with thoughts and feelings and awareness, because it's what she is. It's not fair to oversimplify her. It's not fair to label her a threat without trying to understand her. He's _not_ going to let her get deleted. There's no one else who'll take up arms on her behalf. He's got no choice but to defend her, because someone has to. No one else will.

And John _knows_ this. Knows all of it it like it's been written into his soul, all the words of fire and passion that he holds in his heart, with which to defend her right to exist.

It's just, when he'd needed them, they hadn't come. Even when it had just been his brother, playing Devil's Advocate-John hadn't had the words.

He's supposed to be the comms guy. He kind of needs the words.


	6. the lights are bright and telling

The room they've been given backstage is sleek, clean and full of mirrors. The lights are bright and there's a woman with a brush and a palette and better idea of how to use them than Gordon has (though he's picked up more than a few tips). It's his last interview of the trip, this long, crazy week of press conferences and sit-down interviews, TV talk shows and tabloid snapshots of him and Lady Penelope, on their way about the whirlwind press-tour she's scheduled on International Rescue's behalf. Not that he's complaining. This has been just about the best week ever.

At least, aside from everything he's supposed to be drawing attention away from.

But that's done too. Because to top it off, he'd finally gotten to see John. _Really_ see John, whole and safe and in the flesh. Gordon had been waiting on the tarmac as Tracy-One had taxied down a private runway, and John and Virgil had disembarked. Gordon's sentimental and not ashamed to admit it, he'd gotten more than a little misty grabbing his big brother in a bear-hug. Played it off, of course, made a joke about how Johnny's not supposed to be nearly so tall, gotten a shadow of a small smile in answer. Then it had been into the back of FAB1, off to downtown London to meet Lady Penelope at the TV studio where Gordon's got this last interview to give. Then it'll be back to the Island, back to peace and quiet and relative safety, hopefully back to , and the obscurity of selflessness. It's been a hell of a week.

And now it's over.

John's in the chair next to him, talked into making an appearance alongside Virgil and Gordon on a late night show called The Chatter. Good for PR. End the press tour with the three of them, leave the public wanting more. Virgil and John are both handsome, charismatic. It had been Penelope's idea, and generally speaking Gordon's thrilled to bits to go along with whatever she has planned-but looking at John, he can't help wondering if this is asking a bit much. Still, he'd agreed.

But looking at John now-the lights are bright and telling, and if it weren't for the makeup being expertly applied to the dark shadows below his eyes, the hollows of his cheeks-that place on his throat where there are still faint purple marks-Gordon would still be stunned by just how tired his brother looks. He's pretty sure three years' worth of older isn't supposed to make John look _this_ much older than he was the last time he saw him. John had been Gordon's age, the last time they'd seen each other.

But, well. Malaria. Maybe it's just to be expected. Gordon knows himself well enough to have known better than to look into too many of the details about malaria. Hyperactive empathy has just about killed Gordon in the past. Still, it had been plain enough that his brother had suffered through it, and the way he looks careworn and weary, even as it's painted over by concealer and foundation-there's a pang of feeling right through the heart of him, and he's sure if he's supposed to say something about that.

Gordon's never been great with silences, and even the usually companionable makeup artists aren't talking, so he clears his throat, awkwardly. "-John?"

His brother lifts his eyes to the mirror in front of the both of them, and meets his gaze there. He's been sternly told not too _squirm_ so much, or he'll have an eye put out, and he seems glad to be told to be still. "Mm?"

Gordon clears his throat again, swallows back the nervous laugh that always seems to get in the way when he tries to say something important. "I guess I've been waiting to say it for a while-I'm sorry for being an ass. Back in the Gulf, with the hurricane. I was awful. I didn't mean it, any of the stuff I said about-uh, about your station. And stuff. Uh, you know what I mean."

John's brow furrows slightly, and he gets a warning tap on the side of his nose from the end of a makeup brush before his expression softens into neutrality again. "I don't remember, Gordon," the redhead admits. "I mean, I appreciate it. But...no, I just really don't remember anything you might've said. There was such a hell of a lot going on and I...well. You know what happened. I'm sure you didn't mean it, whatever it was. It's fine. You're forgiven."

"Oh! Oh. Uh, well. I guess that's just okay, then. No harm, no foul. Right?" The truth is he's apologized already. He's apologized a _lot_ , for this one big dark sin that he can't seem to shake the hold of. He's already apologized to a half-conscious version of his brother, far away and feverish, but meeting those blue eyes that look like they belong to Alan, he still doesn't feel the sense of absolution he's expecting. Gordon pauses, tugs at the tissue paper that's been tucked in his collar, as the woman with the makeup brush gives his face a final once over and then nods. "Really, though, nothing? Jeez. I said a lot of shit, John."

John's eyes seem a bit sadder, now that they're blue. The wry twist of a smile doesn't seem to reach them, anyway. Maybe it's just the lighting. "You can repeat it back to me sometime, if it would help? It's probably down in the audio logs. Have Brains dig it out."

Well, that's the worst idea anyone's ever had. If the log exists, Gordon's gonna go back and delete it. "Nnnyeah, no. That's not necessary. Maybe...I dunno. Maybe someday we'll talk it through properly."

Gordon's not sure if John plans to say any more, he's interrupted by a knock on the door, and an intern, peeking in. "Five minutes," the girl announces, and is gone again, as the man who's dusting a setting powder over his brother's face finishes his job, too.

And then it's another one of those whirlwinds, a strange helix of moments comprising that five minute mark, longer and shorter than it seems it should be. A queer little pocket of time that seems to pull him up and forward and carry him along, down a corridor and into a sound stage and microphones and last minute wardrobe checks and Virgil and _Penny_ , appearing for the first time since he'd seen her that morning. Since she'd leaned over the table of the small cafe where they'd gotten breakfast and pecked him demurely on the cheek. Casually as she'd said good-bye, like it hadn't meant anything at all, except Lady Penelope never does anything without strict, deliberate intent, and Gordon's been thinking about it all day.

He wonders if he'll see that kiss in the tabloids, and whether or not they got his good side. Whether or not that was all it was.

Penelope is waiting in the wings, the dark little corridor outside the entrance to the set, and she's the very model of restrained class as she approaches. It's incredibly rare that any of them are in in Penelope's company, and she's tiny next to John and Virgil, tall and broad as they are, respectively. She smiles as she reaches out and clasps John's hands, brief and affectionate, "John, darling. It's lovely to see you again. Are you quite well?"

"Penelope. It's good to see you, too."

Like they've met at a bus stop, as though either of them would ever take a bus. There's a half a moment of awkward silence, and then in another break from form, Penelope's the one who rolls her eyes and exclaims, "Oh, for _heaven's sake_ , John Tracy. A week ago you nearly died. Come _here_." And she lifts her arms and is duly gathered into a hug, a little tighter from her than it is from him, but that's just how it goes with John.

Gordon trades a grin with Virgil behind Penny's back. Penelope's a full foot shorter than John is, and though she makes up four inches in her stiletto heels, the tips of her toes leave the floor for a moment. She laughs softly as she drops back to the ground, and her hands catch his face. And the moment passes, and she's brusque and professional again, and John's straightening the front of his jacket, adjusting his tie.

"Thank you for agreeing to the interview, John, Virgil. It will help enormously with the image we've been trying to present. Now, it should all be fairly civil, don't expect any hardball. There'll be hell to pay if there is. And we _will_ be live, but try not to concern yourself unduly. I do hope it won't be too much? John?"

"I'll be fine, Penny." There's still something distant about John, but the aggressive optimist in Gordon has him dismiss it as the sort of vague nervousness that happens before a TV Thing. There's a sort of anxious flutter in his own stomach. Probably that's all it is.

"Wonderful. Good luck."

Gordon's a theater kid, twelve years of grade school and they'd never been able to keep him from a single stage production. Christmas pageants all the way up through Shakespeare, from the ass end of the donkey in Kindergarten to Peter Pan in middle school, to Puck in a Midsummer Night's Dream, his senior year. He can't help wincing when she says it. He's not sure the conventions of theater apply to talk shows, but one doesn't stand in the wings of a stage and say "good luck". "It's break a leg, Pen, c'mon."

But she doesn't get to correct herself as there's a swell of theme music and the cameras swivel towards the middle of the room. Gordon's heartbeat picks up a notch. The lights come up, searing hot, and he sees John flinch out of the corner of his eye. Virgil doesn't seem to notice, watching a woman cross from the opposite the stage to center of the set. Her audience swells into cheering and applause.

Catherine Cassidy, tall and dark, dressed at least as well as Penelope, if a little bolder, a little more masculine in the cut of her trousers, her sharp shouldered suit jacket. The Chatter occupies a funny middle ground; an award winning journalist, turned towards what was nominally a talk show. Gordon's been _wildly_ excited to be on it. Cassidy's questions are as sharp and clever as she is, and if she _likes_ you (and he has it on good authority that her uncle was aboard a foundering cruise ship that Gordon and Virgil had towed to safe harbor), then the interview will be a pleasure.

She's gone through her preamble, and then her voice like honey and smoke, "My guests tonight will be three out of the five members of International Rescue, because we couldn't get a couch big enough for all five of them at short notice. Talking about their recent upswing in media attention, about the Thunderbirds, and about their family business, please welcome, Johnathan, Virgil, and Gordon Tracy!"

And the music rises again, and Gordon has to put his hand on John's elbow, give his brother a little nudge. Break a leg.


	7. didn't have a heart attack

_Just John, not Johnathan. Please,_ **_please_** _don't call me Johnathan. Only one person was ever supposed to call me Johnathan._

Because although he's sat comfortably on a white leather couch between Gordon and Virgil, and though the lights are bright and hot and the woman who asks the questions asks them kindly-John's still been snapped backward into a cold, dark basement, with the scent of ozone and mildew in his nostrils, and he can barely think for the memory of rough hands grabbing his face, his jaw, bruising his throat.

But he's not there and he _knows that_ and though his mind still scrambles and panics and goes to pieces a little bit, John's long practiced at not letting anyone see him crack.

"I did promsie that I'd go easy on the hard hitting questions, because frankly picking on you three would be a journalistic death sentence, but it's always been a fairly well-known fact that International Rescue's founding had a great deal to do with your mother. I was wondering if each of you would tell me one word you would choose to describe her?"

"Oh man. Funny."

"Smart."

"Brave. Or...no, you know. Kind."

There's an image of himself in his eyeline, the bright, translucent display monitor of one of the cameras that's pointed towards the center of the set.

The version of himself he sees is smiling, nodding and laughing at the right places. John's not sure how that's even possible. He's tired, jet-lagged and he knows he's pretending not to be. Caked in make-up, makes his face feel false and wrong. He's got Gordon on his left and Virgil on his right, and they're both strangers. He's talked to them every day for the last five years of his life, practically, but in the flesh they're both different and it throws him off.

Only-that image he keeps catching in the corner of his eye-surely it's Gordon on the right and Virgil on his left? He sees it through the back of a transparent display, but surely a mirrored image mirrored twice resolves itself into the proper orientation?

Gordon laughs, definitely at John's left elbow, Gordon's on the left.

John reaches for a glass of water on the table in front of him, and finds himself swallowing and answering a question he hadn't heard. He pauses, has to collect himself for a moment. What's got them breaking the relative silence IR's kept up in the public eye, before now.

"Circumstance, mostly."

"You have to understand, it was never actually a media blackout, what our dad wanted, with us and the press. He just wanted our private life separate from that. And, growing up, he didn't want us to know just how much the family was _worth_. Silver spoons, and all. He wanted us to have some perspective."

"Doesn't mean they didn't come at us other ways. There was that thing, you remember, with the school paper?"

"That wasn't _me_ , that was _you_. You told the high school paper that Dad was a tyrant and a slave driver, and _Forbes_ picked it up. We were all grounded for a _month_. And then we had a 'no reporters' rule."

Virgil shifts and jostles John's shoulder a little. He's changed. He'd been in jeans and a dark brown coat, at some point he's changed into a blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The colour of it puts John in mind of their uniforms, for some reason. John forgets to note which side he's on.

"I mean, the larger truth is we're just too busy. There's really no time. Fifty hectares of rainforest in the Amazon are on fire right now, and we're-well, we're here. We're not used to being off the clock, it's weird to know that and not do anything about it. The longest we've gone without needing to respond to some sort of crisis is-"

"-fifty-one hours. And if you think we don't spend all that precious downtime catching up on sleep, well-"

"Never mind sleep, when you talk about _maintenance_ -"

Gordon and Virgil sound too similar. They both have those deep, round voices that make his own sound light by comparison. John's gaze drifts again towards the version of himself that's unperturbed by the fact.

There's a lot that's been said, since he was called Johnathan, and he knows that he's smiled and nodded and answered, but that use of the name that isn't his emptied him from the inside, left him hollow. John's on auto-pilot as the weird facsimile of a conversation happens around him, in this strange, too-bright place with its oddly-placed furniture and a myriad of eyes, staring out of a dark foreground, beyond what he can actually see.

"Yeah, it's a very high standard, but we've just...we've always had it? Our dad always said, if you can achieve excellence, you should strive for excellence, so-"

He really wishes he weren't staring at himself. It's so hard to resolve, how put together he looks, how false. The last time he'd seen himself and not _been_ himself, he'd been staring at a readout with fifteen minutes worth of oxygen and an entity that wanted to kill him, lying to his family in his stead, with his face and his voice. Telling them everything was fine, when everything very much wasn't.

"Two doctorates, actually, MIT. Computer Engineering and Astrophysics-"

"Talk about striving for excellence, ours is the kind of family where _I've_ got a Bachelor of Science, and Virge has a Masters' in Engineering, and then along comes Johnny-Two-Doctorates. Still, it's like Dad said..."

He just, he needs something he can hold onto, something real and familiar and _right_ -it's just nothing's been right ever since he left orbit. Readjusting takes time, and he hasn't done this in too long, and what's worse, he's done it wrong. It's like the vertigo just never stopped, and looking back on everything that's happened, it's jarring to realize that he's the one it all happened _to_ and-

"Virgil, we've got it down here that you had a minor art exhibition a few years ago, is the entire family _actually_ this talented?"

"Oh _wow_ , no, that was right out of college, that was _embarrassing_ -"

There's a camera lens, ringed round with white lights, and his heart catches. For a moment it's enough of a familiar sight to ground him, pull him back into himself, as the aperture finds Gordon's grinning face. There's a brief respite from the sight of himself in the monitors and it helps, it helps a lot to exist only as a single copy of himself and John takes a deep breath, steadying.

"Oh, well, you know. It was a long time ago, the Olympics. I mean, I still swim everyday, probably I will for the rest of my life, but there's a certain point when you realize that you're past your _prime_. Still-"

Just breathing. Breathing helps.

"John? How are you feeling?"

Not well. The camera finds him again and his shadow looks up, attentive to some sound that's not making it through the buzzing emptiness in his head. And then-

Catherine Cassidy is her name, and he knows that. She glances at a prompt on the small tablet in her hand and then looks back up to him again. "There were a few statements released the week previous, regarding the medical emergency that had you down from orbit. How are you doing, after the heart attack?"

This, of everything, is what snaps him out of it.

"I didn't have a heart attack."


	8. hardly blameless

John hasn't had a heart attack, so Penelope's having it for him, standing in front of one of the monitors, watching what's being broadcast. _Live_. She'd said they were live, she'd agreed to let them broadcast live, because life in 2060 occurs at a ridiculous pace. If you don't stream live they you may as well not bother.

John holds up a hand and pauses a moment, picks up the glass on the table again and has another sip of water. Penelope has a couple more heart attacks in the space it takes him to swallow.

Her life is flashing before her eyes, or at least the part of her life that's comprised the previous week; all her careful management, every delicate element of balance necessary to keep public opinion of IR firmly favourable.

The GDF, subsequent to the incident at the hospital, had taken a far stronger stance than necessary against International Rescue. There'd been far more aggression, far more political posturing and big talk than should have been merited, and it had been because of their own mistakes. The GDF had lost a sample of an eradicated disease. Regardless of how John had picked it up, it's owing to GDF negligence that it had gotten back into the world. Leverage.

But the fulcrum falls out from under the whole thing if John tells the press that he'd had _malaria_. The fact that he hasn't gone public with the fact that he'd _had_ malaria is the only reason they haven't attempted to charge him with the creation of an illegal Artificial Intelligence.

It's taken hardball. It's taken a double-edged campaign of public niceties from Gordon; a broad, sweeping tour of sudden insight into International Rescue's members; and a vicious, snarling back alley fight between Tracy Industries' and GDF legal teams. Scott's aged half a decade in the course of a week. John's hardly _blameless_ , but they had been ready to crucify him.

Gordon has an expression imploring him to _do it_ , as though Gordon knows what John's doing. Virgil's wearing an impassive mask, and it's plainly clear that things have left the track of what he expected.

John puts his glass back down.

And then, as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, "Sorry, pardon me. Just, to be technical, I didn't have a heart attack. It was a cardiac arrhythmia, undiagnosed. I suppose 'heart attack' sounds more dramatic. But no, I didn't have a heart attack."

It's a good thing John hasn't had a heart attack, because when Penelope gets her hands on the lapels of his jacket, she's just going to _shake_ him.

There's a brief, almost imperceptible narrowing of Cassidy's eyes and Penelope lives and dies three more times before then the talk show host picks back up as though it's not the remotest issue. "Well, technically correct is the best kind of correct. Would you mind talking more about what happened?"

"We were working a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and it's an incredible amount of stress. More than I realized, I guess."

Good. Good, swing it back around. Sympathetic, but not self-pitying. Penelope can practically feel the blood vessels bruising as she chews her lower lip.

"Well, we're all very glad to know you're recovering. It's got to be a relief to have a break from that kind of pressure for a while. Two doctorates, though, that I didn't know. If someone's going to be up there, I suppose we're all lucky it's someone like you. Can you talk a little about your time at MIT?"

"Oh, some of the best years of my life, easily. There's a thing my father did with scholarships-the Tracy Industries' Scholarship Fund is _still_ a force to be reckoned with- but for the years we were all in school, he'd fund the best and brightest students from across the whole world _into_ our same degree programs, so that the grade curve was that much higher. My graduating class at MIT were literally the best minds in the world at the time. Dad made sure of it. I was in the shallow end of that pool, and I came out of it with two degrees."

Penelope's brain melts into a puddle of gooey white noise and relief. The shark has stopped circling, it's a puff piece again. Gordon's been the one in front of cameras for the past week, though there've been distant, glancing shots of Scott as he moves about his new day to day with Tracy Industries.

Rumors are flying that the eldest son is finally stepping into his father's shoes. Scott _hates_ it, because of course it's not true. But better that these rumors are flying than rumors flying that the second eldest had created a demonstrably unstable Artificial Intelligence, and then contracted malaria in low earth orbit and left it loose in one of the most powerful space stations in orbit. Scott can suck it up.

There's a complicated mess of signals from the director, and the music swells as Cassidy turns back to the camera for the commercial. "International Rescue, thank you, gentlemen, for joining me and for the work you do! Up next we'll be talking to the worldwide phenomenon and chart-topping heartthrobs known as _Perfect Fifth_. Perhaps a touch less heroic and with fewer doctorates between them, but they've sold more albums than the three of you put together."

There's obliging laughter and then the camera cuts up and away. Penelope's honed in on John like a hawk, and he sags visibly against the back of the couch, presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. For a moment a flicker of doubt darkens Penelope's suspicions-the possibility that John had just misspoken. This is concerning for a whole host of other reasons. Notably the fact that John _doesn't_ misspeak.

Gordon's reaching across the low coffee table between them to shake Catherine Cassidy's hand, while Virgil puts his arm around John's shoulders and leans in to ask a question. The mics are off, Penny doesn't catch it, but John just nods in answer and Virgil's hand on his shoulder tightens slightly. Probably she won't be able to shake him like he deserves. Probably that would be unkind. Especially if he doesn't deserve it.

Penelope approaches as Cassidy gets to her feet and turns to address her. She either doesn't catch or diplomatically ignores the exchange between John and Virgil, as the pair of them retreat to the darkness offstage. "Lady Creighton-Ward. I'm not sure which of us owes the other a favour after this."

Penelope inclines her head graciously. "Traditionally in such circumstances I believe it's called even. Thank you, Ms. Cassidy, for keeping it fairly light. It's been a long week."

Cassidy cracks a grin and nods. "I've been following your long week. That interview with that American rag, that little pit bull of a man they let out of the cage to hassle high-profile subjects?"

"Alex King, with Essential America. It was early days after we started the tour. He was the first person to try and take the gloves off."

"Yes, him, the hack. Your boy here took him to _pieces_ when he dropped that 'playboy philanthropist' line. Can I get you to quote that back to me, Mr. Tracy? What was the line...?"

As though she doesn't know the line.

Gordon's grin in response to being called Penny's _boy_ is practically _audible_ and Penelope rolls her eyes indulgently, as he quotes the line that went viral moments after he said it, "Let's light the studio on fire and see how many of your colleagues _you_ carry out."

Penelope flushes a little, but in her defense, it's a line Gordon delivers _very well_. Catherine Cassidy is married to another woman and even _she_ flashes a wink at him. "Yeah, that's the one. Nicely done, kid. Shop around a bit if you ever want someone to write your biography, and then bring it back to me. A series of five, you and your brothers. Make me some of your millions."

"Ma'am, you'll be the first person I call."

"No, darling, don't do that. Shop around and find out how much better I am and how lucky you'd be to have me. Then come back and beg."

Gordon doesn't seem to know how to take that one, so Penelope takes over. "Gordon, go and find out how many cars we'll be taking to the airport, your grandmother expects you three back on the island before dawn."

Her eyes flit to the countdown to the next segment and then they're back on Penelope. It's hot under the lights. This is one of the only people in the world who can make the Lady Creighton-Ward nervous. They've known each other since they were girls at St. Bartholomew, prep school. And each knows exactly how influential the other is. "John seems like he's putting on a bit of a brave face. Worse than it seems, or-?"

"Don't fish, Catherine." Penelope shakes her head and sighs. Then she lies through her teeth, "No, as far as I know it's just what he said. I've known John for years, and his heart's always been rather older than the rest of him. I think it's all finally starting to catch up, the hospital, the travel, the week in New York...I doubt he slept a wink on the flight over. Really, I think he just needs a rest." She layers emphasis on this last, the slight warning of just how unpleasant life will be if John Tracy is any way _hindered_ about getting a rest.

 _Don't fish_ is the appropriate term to use, because Catherine Cassidy is a _shark_ when there's ink the water. "Mm. Hands off of John, then. I'll trade you a case of '43 Dom Perignon if you can get me ten minutes of air time with Scott."

"Don't you have a boy band to interview?" Penelope asks archly.

A smile with too many teeth. "Don't be catty, Pen. I was kind to your boys. I didn't follow a single garden path towards asking how the death of their father has changed International Rescue."

And for that Penelope's intensely grateful. The less said about Jeff Tracy the better. A two minute warning light flashes and Catherine nods to someone over Penelope's shoulder. Penny takes her cue to disengage. "Well, thank you anyway, Catherine. If you hound Scott yourself he might bite. Drop my name if you like, you can rest assured he'll have seen you being kind to his brothers. It'll go a long way."

"Noted, Penelope. We'll call it even."

"Delightful."

There's a brief, cursory hug between the two women, and then Penelope rejoins the boys where they're waiting in the wings, chatting with Parker. Whatever arrangements have been made for transit, Penelope ignores them, draws a bead on John, leaning against the wall with his eyes half-closed.

She's still watching him as she addresses his brothers. "Gordon, Virgil. Make whatever arrangements you need to with your respective protection details and we'll meet you at the airport. Parker, bring the car around. John, you'll join me in FAB1. It's been far too long. I think it's time we talked."

Penelope hasn't seen John in years. He looks exhausted. She's just about seen him blow an entire media campaign on live television. He _might_ have done it on purpose. She'd like a word. It's not like he has a _choice_.


	9. a guilty man's innocence

FAB1 is the sort of car where hot towels can be provided upon request.

John's rubbing the last of the makeup from underneath his eyes and trying to figure out whether or not he wants to be the one to break the silence. Penny's left the seat in between them empty in the back of the long, low sedan, and her legs are crossed at the knee. She's patient, looking out the window. They're navigating their way back through London and its typical gridlock, back towards the airport. They're following Virgil and Gordon in the beast of a Cadillac being driven by the protection detail Kayo had assigned to Virgil.

Penelope's playing Virgil's game, waiting for him to feel awkward and speak. She seems to play it a bit better than Virgil does, though. Either that or John's just tired.

Well, he's definitely tired. He's too tired to want anything but just to get this over with. So he cedes ground first. "Listen, Penelope-"

"If you hadn't had a heart attack I would be forced to grab you by the collar and _shake you_ , John Tracy." This is in an acid tone, and she glances across the backseat, daring him to say what he's obviously thinking in answer.

John's never been very good at not stating the obvious. "Well, I haven't had a damn heart attack."

" _I know that_ , and thus you should appreciate that it's taking considerable restraint not to rattle your head clean off your shoulders," she snaps, and her voice is just the tiniest bit ugly in her anger. She seems to hear herself and takes a deep breath. Her hands go to her purse, and she retrieves her compact, flicking it open and fiddling with it, turning it over and over in nervous hands. "All that _work_ , John," she bursts, sudden and exasperated. "The data breach was bad enough, but having to keep quiet the fact that you had an illegal AI aboard your station while it happened? It could have been _disastrous_. It's _far_ more difficult to convince the world of a guilty man's innocence than it is to convince them of an innocent man's guilt. You are _emphatically_ not the latter."

 _That's_ been made abundantly clear. John's been closeted with lawyers and specialists and consultants for the past week, trying to convince anyone at all just how important EOS is, that she was worth the investment of time and money into the legal fight for complex AI.

The only answer he's been given in response is that he should be grateful that the GDF are willing to look the other way in regards to his involvement with creating the AI. Probably he should be facing sanctions. Worst had been being told that it would serve utterly no purpose and help no one if he claimed responsibility for her. They'd still have no reason not to delete her, and would only gain incentive to punish him.

So John's not sure he's sorry. In fact, if he's sorry for anything, it's that he didn't blow the lid off the whole damn thing when he had the chance. He's still sick and he hasn't stopped being tired. "It's not _my lie_ , Penelope, and I'm getting sick of telling it. They gave me malaria."

Lady Penelope flares at this and snaps her compact closed. She shifts to sit and glare across the backseat at John. "They did _not_ , and even if they had, you should be thankful we had it to use against them."

" _No_. Why the hell would I be thankful for that? Why should I be?" John blazes right back, a rare spark of anger, though admittedly he's been losing hold of his temper more often than he ever used to, these days. "I'm going to lose the only thing I've ever done that's ever actually _mattered_. And people keep telling me to be grateful that I haven't lost more? How would _you_ feel? What will the GDF care, anyway, about something I _didn't even actually say_ on some stupid talk show?"

Penelope's answering sigh is exaggerated, and almost contemptuous in her exasperation. "The GDF aren't incompetent, they're just _large_ and muddled up with bureaucracy. You think there aren't intelligence agents following your every move? They have the means to _bury you_ if you gave them enough reason. John, what on earth _possessed_ you to-"

"M'lady?" There's a rusty "ahem" from the driver's seat and both Penelope and John look up, catch a pair of bright blue eyes looking back and forth between them. Parker address Penelope first, even as the traffic begins to move again and he smoothly changes lanes. "Go gently, m'lady," he chides, rebuking her ever so slightly, before his eyes meet John's. "Were you quite all right, Master John?" he queries, bushy eyebrows quirking upward with mild concern. And then, still with that improbable gentleness from a man of his history, "D'you remember anything else you said?"

There's an awful silence, during which John realizes he's not answering.

That's the thing no one was supposed to ask. Because John's not actually sure.

So he doesn't _know_ how to answer, only knows that he can't tell them what was actually true-that he'd been nearly shattered to pieces beneath the veneer of composure, and it all had to do with that _name_ , the name he'd last heard from the man who _had_ tried to kill him.

But he still doesn't have the words and the silence stretches further and Penelope's entire attitude softens. She slides across the bench seat and puts a hand lightly on his arm. "John?" she asks, with her voice quieted and with the edge taken off it. " _Were_ you all right?"

No, but he'd managed. It doesn't matter, because he'd _managed_ and he hadn't blown the stupid secret, he'd told the damn lie that isn't his. And when he'd snapped back into himself, he'd been burning with black, spiteful anger, and he'd been tempted to stare right into the camera and tell the truth, instead of the lie that belongs to the people who are going to kill his partner. His _friend_.

"John?" Her hand shifts to take his and the other joins it, sandwiches his fingers between her palms, squeezes reassuringly.

It works. Unexpectedly, in the midst of his state of minor crisis, that small point of human contact is an anchor. Then, haltingly, he stumbles over what he's not quite sure is the truth, "I didn't mean to. Maybe. Maybe I did, I don't know. It-I just, it-it seemed like the only thing that made any sense. I didn't know I'd said it until I heard myself say it, but I'm not sorry. I'm _not_. I didn't have a damn heart attack, I had _malaria_ and I was so sick I nearly died. I'm tired of being told that my family's reputation is the only thing I have that's worth protecting. It's not true."

"Oh, John." Penelope's hands tighten around his. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be so hard on you, it's only-"

"How would you feel if they were going to kill Parker?" It's rude enough that he interrupts her, but as soon as he says it, John remembers that Parker's in the _car_ and that he hadn't meant to say it. That keeps happening. It needs to _stop happening_. "Sorry. Oh, Christ, Parker. No, sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't-I didn't mean that-"

"Quite all right," Parker answers, and changes lanes again. "Think nothing of it, Master John."

It's the sort of magnanimous kindness that makes John feel cold and wretched inside for having said something so awful. And it continues, as Parker turns off down a side street with a glance at Penelope. She nods and he accelerates slightly. "If you'll pardon the suggestion, Master John, I think there's a discussion needs having in regards to what went on in Zurich. And I think it would be best had over a cup of tea, somewhere quiet and private."


	10. whose face belies his heart

It's a small cafe off of a small side street, an automated affair, and they're the only three people in it. No one will be looking for them, and it's not like a chartered flight is about to leave without one of its passengers. They'll be no later to the airport than could be accounted for by bad traffic. And Parker's bound and determined that Lady Penelope talk to John. There's information she needs, and John's the one who has it.

But they'll need to go gently getting it out of him.

The Global Conflict is twenty years past, and Lord Hugh Creighton-Ward still wakes screaming from nightmares. Half the time his daughter goes to him, and half the time it's Parker. But his daughter has only been doing so for the past ten years. Parker's been doing it for all twenty and he knows the look of a haunted man. And he'd known from the beginning of the whole affair with John just what he was looking at.

So Parker's been here before, sat across the table from someone who's hunched himself over a mug of hot, sweet tea that he doesn't really want. Parker knows what it means when someone won't meet the eyes of the people who are concerned about him, and who won't start the conversation, not for love nor money, about what's really wrong.

But as much as Parker's heart hurts for the young man across the table, his fingers scarred and tight on white ceramic, there isn't time to talk about what's really wrong. One day. Hopefully one day _soon_ , Parker will get to take John aside and explain that it's the scent of cinnamon, for him, that jerks him back to a dark back alley behind a spice shop in Morocco, and three men who had wanted him dead. Cinnamon robs him of words and of presence and of memory, leaves him shaken and twenty years older on the outside than he is on the inside, where he's caught in that memory of Morocco.

But there's no time for Morocco. It's time for Zurich.

Penelope's like a live wire beside him, all raw, electric tension, but you'd never know it if you weren't Parker. Lady Penelope is nibbling a madeleine and has her eyes politely downcast, evidently absorbed in the contents of her own teacup (Earl Grey, one sugar, no cream), so as not to put one too many pairs of eyes on John. There's restiveness in her, impatience. But more than that, there's concern, and guilt.

It's not surprising he caught what his partner missed. Frequently that's Parker's job. Lady Penelope is half his age. Technically he's still training her, and will continue to do so until the day circumstance ends their partnership. They're student and mentor as much as they are mistress and servant, principal and bodyguard. She's quick, bright, brilliant. Penelope has the same mind for espionage that her father had, and Parker's prouder of her than he can say.

But she's still young, not even John's age. And sometimes, especially about people she wishes to believe whole and safe, she misses things.

And, just the same as John, he can tell she's hesitant to speak first. For all her sharpness and the quickness of her mind, Penelope had needed to be told to back off, to go gently. Now, Parker can tell, she's casting her mind back over all her mistakes, her cascading series of errors. Coaxing John into an interview on live TV. Failing to notice that he wasn't quite handling it. Failing to anticipate the departure from the script. And running roughshod over him afterward, when everything she's done has been to help protect him. John will need a little push to start talking. Penelope's not the one who'll push him any further.

Parker's an old hand a little pushes, and he has a long draught from his mug, sugary, two teabags strong and more milk than water. He puts his mug down carefully atop a coaster and reminds himself that there's no place for the boy from his memory at this table. The man in his place is lost and drifting, and he needs a sharp lesson in the reality of his situation, because things will likely get worse before they get better.

So it's to hell with little pushes. Parker gives John a _shove_. "It was the Hood then, was it?"

A lesser conversational partner than Lady Penelope would have shot a glance at him, but she's unperturbed, sipping her tea. It's John who blanches at the mention of the name, and his hands leave the cup of tea in favour of a paper napkin. He twists this in his fingers for a moment before he shakes his head and finds his voice. "Not...not quite. Someone who worked for him. He did that mask thing he's done before, with the hologram, but the other way around. His face, his voice. Some sort of real time transmission device, actually pretty clever."

Penelope's pulled her compact out and she discretely begins to make notes in her own personal, complex blend of shorthand.

John's been being _handled_ for the past two weeks. There's a sort of weariness that comes of not being dealt with directly, and the straightforwardness of the question almost seems to rouse him from some stupor. He continues, unprompted, "I knew him. I mean, I'd never _met_ the man, not really, but we had a pair of rescues. Completely different fields, both industrial incidents-Penny, you remember with Hydrexler? That was the second time. I should've caught on then, we've _never_ saved the same person twice. He just-he seemed like the sort of person it could happen to, I guess. That much bad luck. Hapless."

Parker leans back as Penelope leans forward, and he lets her take over. John's straightened up a bit, seems to have found firmer footing, and Parker hopes it helps him to talk. God knows they need the answers. "What did he want, John?" Penelope asks and her tea and cake are abandoned beside her.

 _That_ perks him right up. "He had access to a GDF server, the one where they sequestered Five's code. I don't know how, but then, I don't know how I got malaria, either. He wanted me to transfer EOS' code."

"Your AI program?"

John's eyes flash slightly and he frowns, correcting her, "She's not _my_ AI. She's her own AI. And 'program' is an oversimplification."

Parker manages not to wince at this. Penelope is less successful. John doesn't notice.

His fingers go to work on the napkin in his hands, methodically tearing it into little squares as he talks. It toes the line between a nervous habit and just something he does without thinking. "He wanted her transferred onto a laptop he brought, but it wouldn't have worked. I don't know why he thought it _would_ ; he can't know the first thing about her if he thought she could cross a basic wide-spec connection in ten minutes and keep all of her functionality intact. Right? And onto a _laptop_. Physical data storage, even! She just recoded it, and used the rig like she was a remote operator, just like it was a subsystem on a larger network. She couldn't _actually_ have fit on the drive. She'd have needed to render down into basic protocols and then recompile and without complete access to the Internet and a database to expand into like what Five's got, she'd just be a fraction of herself. And it's not _impossible_ for her to completely recode from the right recursive backup, but the problem with _that_ is-"

A doctorate in computer science, of course this is what John would find significant. Penelope's eyes have narrowed and she knows the same thing Parker does-there's a leak inside the GDF, some weak spot where the Hood's found access. "Did he say why?"

This cuts off the flood of jargon and technical data that John had gone rambling off into. There's another pang at Parker's heart for how transparent John can be, how he's the only person at the table whose face belies his heart. "I don't remember."

"Anything might help."

John's also the only person at the table who's not a natural liar.

"I really don't know. He said a lot. I really...I wasn't in great shape, I really don't remember. I don't understand why you'd need to know, it's over. I really just want to try and move past it."

He's a mess of tells, his hands lose hold of their carefully ordered activity, and he shifts them to the cup of tea in front of him, gone unpleasantly cold. His gaze accidentally catches Parker's and then it breaks away, his fingers brushing his hair off his brow. He stands abruptly and then seems to realize just how awkward the gesture is. For lack of anything in them, his hands go to the cuffs of his jacket, straighten them. He looks pointedly towards the door of the small cafe kiosk. "We really should go. We've got that flight to the island to catch and-"

"It's a chartered flight, John. They won't leave without you," Penelope reminds him gently and takes his hand, pulls him back into his seat.

Parker punches a few buttons on the touchscreen on the table, and another mug of tea appears, hot, to replace the first one John hadn't asked for. He nudges it helpfully in the younger man's direction. "Are you all right, lad?" he questions, the soft touch to muffle the edge creeping into Penelope's voice. "I know, it's funny how some parts of it are all plain and sharp, and others are all muddled up, but-"

John interrupts again and shifts in his chair. "Fine, I'm fine. I don't think now's the time to talk about it. We can talk in the car, maybe. We really-"

The Lady's voice cuts like a knife. Of the pair of them, improbably, Parker's always been the softer touch. But he's done his part, and the time for gentle words is passed. "John, he mentioned your father. You _know_ he mentioned your father. I heard you, Parker heard you. Whatever he said about your father, I _need to know_. I don't work for your family, John, I work for _your father_." She pauses and her hand reaches out to clasp John's wrist, almost in apology, for the lie she's about to stop telling. "And I haven't heard from your father in nearly a year."


	11. golden light across his chest

Well, of course the plane hasn't left without him.

He remembers the scent of Penelope's hair and the way she murmurs something when she hugs him goodbye. He remembers the grip of Parker's leather gloved hands, one squeezing his palm and the other catching his elbow just briefly. He remembers passing Gordon on the stairs up into the cabin, remembers glancing back and wondering what his brother had needed to say to Penelope, with an awkward few feet of distance between them, his hands in his pockets. He remembers a nod from Virgil, a jerk of his brother's head towards an open door, and the turned down bed beyond. Younger brother. Right.

John shrugs out of his jacket and kicks off a pair of oxford shoes. There's a watch on his wrist and he stares at it for a while. Gordon sticks his head in the door after an indeterminate amount of time, and does a little flight attendant spiel that John gathers is supposed to be funny. He rolls his eyes, laughs where appropriate, and takes his seat in the corner of the room, straps in for takeoff and thinks about nothing in particular until they're airborne.

Virgil's shaking him awake by the time they've hit cruising altitude, and there're only a few feet between John and the bed, but it feels like further than should be worth the trouble.

Still, it's where he wakes up the second time, and there's a line of golden light falling across his chest from the door, open a crack and Gordon and Virgil, with their too-similar voices, audible at the edge of John's hearing.

"-no, just, I dunno. With everything Pen's said this past week, I-"

There's a clink of ice in a glass, crystalline. "Yeah, hold on a minute. Conversational time out. 'Cuz since when do _you_ get to drop the title? And for that matter, the '-elope'? She's still Lady Penelope to me. It's only been a week, what gives?"

The silence that answers this is awkward. Gordon clears his throat and there's the metallic sound of a bottle cap snapping off a bottle. "Lemme alone. It's not...why's that gotta be a _thing_? Scott calls her Lady P, John calls her Penelope. She said it's fine. I can call her Pen, Penny. It's not anything. What, I can't try and save on words?"

"It's just how you _don't_ , usually. A big brother's gotta wonder. There was that thing in South America-"

"Oh my _god_ don't bring that up, Virge, for chrissakes-"

There's a snort of laughter from the older of the pair. "Seems relevant."

"I never should've told you, I should never tell you _anything_."

"Well, _what_ , who else're you gonna talk to? Scott? _Alan_? John's still sleeping, not that he'd be _any_ kind of help with this kinda thing. But there's a picture of her kissing you in the tabloids, what'm I supposed to think?" Virgil's smirk is the one you can actually hear in his voice, the one that's got a lot to do with however many beers preceded the one he just popped open. "Looked like you were getting your dying wish."

 _This_ silence is almost painful. John's not actually sure he's not dreaming the conversation, but equally he can't imagine how his subconscious could possibly have come up with the idea of Penelope kissing _Gordon_. "...I dunno."

There's an apology in the moment it takes Virgil to hear just how dejected his younger brother sounds. "Oh, hey, c'mon, I wasn't-"

"No, I mean _really_ , I just don't know. It's been-I mean, it was a weird week. I mean, kind of sometimes it was really great, but now it's over and I just...I don't know. Scott needed someone to bail him out and Penny-Pen-Lady-oh, _thanks_ , Virgil, now I can't say it without _thinking about it_ -augh. Penelope. The whole press tour thing. Sure, I figured, better than staying cooped up on the Island. At least I got to do _something_ to help. Besides, all that attention, and you know we _never_ get any attention. Drives me crazy sometimes."

"What, _you_?"

"Virgil, d'you wonder why we don't talk about this stuff? _This is why we don't talk about this stuff._ Shut up and let me talk if you wanna talk."

"Sorry."

John wonders if this conversation would even be happening, if he were awake and taking part in it. Almost certainly not. He is, after all, absolutely no kind of help with this kind of thing. Still, distantly, as a means of keeping his mind off of absolutely everything else, it's the sort of conversation that's perfect for listening in on.

Gordon sighs heavily and there's the soft, musical sound of air being blown across the top of a beer bottle. Virgil, filling the silence with music, the way he does. Then the clink of ice in a glass as the rest of whatever Gordon's drinking gets downed in one go.

"I guess I just don't know how much of it was _real_. Half the time I didn't know what was going on. She led me around by the hand and I went where she wanted and did what she said and it was all just a big smokescreen. Just... Trying to keep the heat off Scott and eyes off John and I'm glad I did it and I would do it again, but-"

"... But Lady Penelope?"

Gordon laughs at himself and it's sad and sardonic. "She's a professional liar. And I knew that! I know that, even. But I'm still just a dumb bastard who really wants to _believe_ her."

A low whistle from Virgil, more music. And then, sympathetic and almost kind of impressed, "Oh man. You really got it bad, huh?"

There's the splash of liquid over ice again and a sort of weak, quiet chuckle from Gordon. "Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, I really, really do."

This is the sort of thing John's no kind of help with. As such he makes a deliberate mental note to inform Penelope of the conversation he's overheard. It's sort of a shame that he's not part of the discussion. John's never been well-versed in affairs of the heart.

But he can absolutely confirm the fact that Penelope is a liar.


	12. wears his weariness so differently

She misses her son every day. It's hard seeing glimpses of Scott out of the corner of her eye and feeling that lurch of grief in the center of her chest. She misses her husband, though he's far longer gone. Virgil's a carbon copy of Grant, like him in more ways than any of his brothers. She misses being young, misses being _Emily_ instead of _Grandma_ , and the way that Gordon's like a mirror reflecting back her own youth. And she misses John, by proxy, in the way that Alan's always the one who mentions him, always thinks of him, reminds everyone that he's still out there.

Alan's bouncing on his toes beside her, and it's only his age that shows his eagerness; his grandmother is just as excited as he is for the return of her wayward grandchild. The plane's finally taxied to a stop on the runway, and the aircraft is an interloper on the island. It belongs to the boys the same way everything of their father's does now, and in an odd sort of way it fits in, a sleek, modern piece of machinery with Jeff's usually stylish touches in the design. Just more little things that make her miss her son.

When John appears at the top of the stairs down from the plane's cabin, his grandmother suddenly remembers her daughter-in-law, and how long it's been since she went out of her way to miss Lucille. It's only seeing John in person that one remembers how willowy and graceful his mother was, and just how much the second son resembles her. The pair of them are easy to forget, in their long absence.

Lucille hadn't been that much older than John when she'd died. It's a funny thought to be struck by, considering how much older John looks than the last time he was home, how he wears his weariness so differently than his mother had, plain in his face and his smile when he sees his grandmother.

Grandma's waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and she holds out her arms expectantly as John descends. For a moment she worries that it's been too long, that they've lost touch, and that it will be an awkward, brief embrace-but John's steps quicken in the few feet of distance between them, and suddenly she's got her arms full of somebody who's very badly needed a hug from his grandmother for the past two weeks.

Nearly half a foot of height between them and his face still manages to find her shoulder, and her fingers tighten at the back of his neck. "Welcome home," Grandma murmurs, and ruffles John's hair.

"Thanks," gets whispered in her ear, muffled and if she's not mistaken, just a little bit teary.

If John's composure has slipped at all, it's firmly back in place as Alan gets his turn, flinging himself at his older brother. A hundred and fifty pounds of the baby of the family hits his brother in a tackling hug, and Grandma has to snag him by the back of the shirt to keep him from knocking John over.

"Easy, kiddo," she chides, but the smile on Alan's face is so bright and genuine she has to let him go almost immediately.

"We didn't think you were _ever_ coming home," Alan declares, with his hands on his brother's arms, staring up at him with light in his eyes for what seems like the first time since the whole ordeal started. The hyperbole stings at his Grandma's heart, for how true it almost was. Alan, eternally optimistic, misses the other connotation.

"Well, here I am," is all John says in answer, eternally taciturn as Grandma threads her arm through his and gives it an affectionate squeeze.

"Here he is!" Gordon echoes, halfway down the stairs behind him with a bag slung over his shoulder, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "And me. You know, in case you missed _me_ , Al."

"You've been on TV for a whole week and Grandma wouldn't stop watching you, I got _sick_ of your big dumb face," Alan shoots right back and ducks out of the way, whooping, as Gordon drops his bag and goes to try and nab his brother in a headlock. Then they're tearing off up the tarmac, chasing and shouting and running off the energy of being kept on short leashes for the past week.

"Careful!" their grandmother yells after them, but she chuckles fondly as she does. It feels like far longer than it has been, but she's finally got all her boys back under one roof. John's watching the pair of them with a distant expression, and she leans her head affectionately against his arm. "Nothing changes, Johnny-cake," she tells him, in an attempt to reassure him that it's still home and that he's going to fit right back in.

There's a soft sigh and something far away in his voice when he answers, "I think maybe some things might."

* * *

Well. That won't do.

So from then on it's a campaign of aggressive grandmothering. There are nearly three years to make up for, and John seems glad to be a little bit babied. Scott's home, landed earlier that morning, but he'd gone straight to bed. Virgil and Gordon disappear down to the hangar, to try and find something to do with their Thunderbirds, grounded as they have been for the past week. John slept on the plane, he's not tired, so Grandma sticks to him like _glue_. Alan tags along behind, uncharacteristically shy and vanishing every now and again, as though he's not sure he's wanted.

They wander the house, stop by the guest room-by _John's_ room, made up in anticipation of his arrival-for a change of clothes, and wind up in the kitchen. The lounge has seen too much of the wrong kind of idle traffic lately and Grandma dials up an order for cookies and coffee and milk, sends Alan off to do his homework, and sits down across the table from John.

"It's good to have you home," she tells him, and wishes she could be sure he felt the same way. Like everyone else in the family, she's trying to remember if he's always been this quiet.

"I'm sorry I didn't call more often," John volunteers, after the kitchen module has dinged and he's been provided with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a tall mug of milk. The cookies are uniformly, perfectly circular, unnatural things. He rotates one between the tips of his long fingers and his grandmother refrains from telling him not to play with his food. "We haven't ever talked as much as we should."

"You had a demanding job, Johnny. I still saw you around."

"Still." John shifts, takes a bite out of the provided cookie. He follows it with a sip of milk, puts the mug down and turns it just slightly, so the handle's parallel to the edge of the table. He's so measured, so deliberate about everything he does, it's almost like he's pretending at being a person.

"Do you want to talk now?" she prompts, patient the way grandmothers have to be.

John grows so still and it takes him so long to answer that she almost wonders if he's ignoring the question. He's heartbreakingly like his mother in appearance, with his straight, narrow nose and the deep red-gold of his hair, but his reticence and reservation-that they never shared. Alan channels Lucille most closely, and Alan's the one who's always been closest to John. If Lucille were still here, her son would probably have an easier time talking.

"...have you ever failed someone?"

Grandma's hand crosses the table to catch her grandson's fingers and a pair of big blue eyes meet hers, imploring. "You haven't failed anyone, John."

He shakes his head and his fingers tighten against hers and there's something he needs to be told, but she doesn't yet know what it is, "No, I have. I absolutely have. She's...she's _so_ important, Grandma. I should've been able to make someone understand. I should've known what to do."

Whether or not EOS is a person isn't the question. Whether or not it's time for true AI to make its debut in the world isn't either. Whether or not John's going to be able to forgive himself, that's all his grandmother wants to know. Before she can find anything to say, he has a question of his own, "-how far would Dad have gone, for one of us?"

This is a sharp, short stab at his grandmother's heart, though John can't have known he'd hurt her by asking. She has to let his hand go and have a long sip of coffee before she can answer, as gently as she can, "You're not a father to this thing, kiddo. I know what you wanna think, I promise I do, but it's not the same thing."

"But I'm not _nothing_ to her, either. I can't... I can't think of anything else that's close. I _made_ her. That counts, that _has_ to count," he answers back, and there's a flare of defiance in those bright blue eyes. "I'm _responsible_ for her, I'm all she has. No one understands. They're going to _kill her_. I can't...I can't keep losing people. I can't, I won't get over it. It's too much."

Grandma sighs, low and heavy, and wishes she didn't have it in common with John when she says, "Sweetheart. We both lost your father." Her hand leaves her coffee cup, still warm from the heat through the ceramic as her palm cradles his cheek, his skin cool against hers. "But I lost a child, John. You're losing a collection of ones and zeroes, and I know what you _want_ to be true, baby boy, I really do. I know you think you're gonna get to that kinda grief but-Johnny, I have to tell you, it's a whole other league. I hope you never know what it's like."

His eyes lock with hers for a moment and it seems as though there's something he wants to say. But instead there's a stubborn shake of his head, and he pushes up and away from the table, and leaves without a further word. His grandmother watches him go, missing his father.

And his mother, who might have known what to say.


	13. still as stone, straight as steel

John Tracy's eyes are green again.

A spare pair of contacts, a pair he'd forgotten he'd sent earthward for Brains to have a look at when the display hardware had started acting up. They'd been looked at, repaired, and wiped of all data, to be reprogrammed whenever there was time on hand.

Well, John has nothing but time to kill now, and he desperately needs something to keep himself occupied.

It's taking longer than it really should, it's hard to concentrate. His mind keeps drifting to the larger reality of his crumbled apart life outside the bedroom door, and he has to force himself to focus. He just needs to let himself sink into the sort of procedural thinking that goes along with coding from scratch. He needs his brain to switch over into auto-pilot, and just to lose itself in work.

So, lenses in his eyes once more, a spare comm unit on his wrist, and he's programming a new HUD from scratch. There's a desk in the guest room, and he's found a holo console lying around, and he's pulled up the screens he needs to reference his left and right displays before he maps them onto the nanocircuitry in his eyes. Wireless. Basic networking, permissions and passwords to access the status readouts from anything on the island that has associated status readouts, access to the island's servers and systems and the global network beyond. With the basics mapped, he ports the display information to the receivers in his contacts. A few moments pass. He blinks. And then a layer of information augmenting reality flares across his vision as he turns his head.

John's _missed this_. He breathes a sigh of something that approaches contentment, as he begins to familiarize himself with the new displays.

It's only a basic HUD, at the moment, and it's not yet integrated with any other holographic outputs on the Island. He has no control over it beyond simple movements of his gaze to flick through different screens of data, otherwise he needs to use the wrist comm to actually interact with what he sees. That'll change. He needs to rewire his fingers-more accurately, he needs _Brains_ to rewire his fingers. That'll be his next stop. The engineer hasn't actually been to say hello yet, but that's just the way Brains is. John almost appreciates it, not being mobbed by yet another party. In his own time.

He adds the appropriate parameters to ping each of his brothers and their comms and suddenly he can see distant markers in all directions, bigger or smaller according to proximity. Scott's on the floor overhead. Alan's down in the kitchen. Virgil's just above him in the lounge, probably at the piano. Gordon's the furthest afield, a far distant icon at the shore's edge, either just finished or just about to go for a swim.

And Kayo. In the corridor right outside.

John's spine stiffens like a steel rod's been dropped into it. From a height. His entire posture feels jarred into taut, tense awareness and he has to deliberately unclench his hands. Scar tissue tugs tight along his fingers. A knock on his door, crisp and professional, and he doesn't know what to do. He can't ignore it, everyone in the house knows where he is. Tabs are being kept on him, as though everyone expects him to vanish again.

For a moment he debates internally about throwing himself into bed and pretending to be asleep, but the door opens before he can make any such move. John turns reflexively in his chair and has nothing to say to the woman in the doorway.

It's not clear if she's expecting anything from him, probably she can read in his posture and general attitude that he's not sure how to act around her. She's in her flight-suit, there's a gun strapped to her hip. His newly networked contacts helpfully inform him that it's a Heckler and Koch P9, as though that's something he needs to know. Her demeanor stays crisp and professional as she enters the room, though she doesn't approach. Maybe she notices his fingers tensing again. That's the sort of thing that Kayo's trained to notice.

"I was hoping we might have a talk," she starts, only the slightest bit cautious, but there's something about the way she says it that diminishes the implication that it's a suggestion. Apparently they're going to have a talk.

"I'm not sure I have anything to say," John answers, and he's aiming for cool but it comes out cold.

Kayo's arms are crossed in front of her chest, and that's just the way Kayo stands. Anyone used to her company knows so, but to John it looks defensive, puts him on edge. Especially armored and armed as she is, invading his space, and with her kinship to a man who'd wanted to kill him. He's just now noticing how their eyes are similar, the same golden green colour that had flared in his face in the dark. He looks away. "John, I understand if you're a little uneasy. I'm sorry it came out the way it did, and I know it's a shock. But he's not my family."

" _We're_ not either."

Only that hadn't been what he'd meant to say. He hadn't meant to say _anything_ , it had just been what blinked into his head, and apparently some part of his brain had felt it needed saying. It's just _true_ , is all it is, it's a fact. She's not family, Kayo's not part of their family. She was brought in by their father. John doesn't know the reasons, and he has to work very hard not to think about his father when he risks a glance at Kayo.

She's still as stone and straight as steel, staring right back with those awful green eyes. "I know that," she answers, low and deliberate, and if he's hurt her with what he's said, she doesn't show it. "I work for your family, it's my job to keep you all safe. I understand if you don't trust me to do that job, but I assure you I've done my best. What happened to you-"

"You don't know what happened to me."

"I know more than what you've told me." Her answer is brisk and her tone is sharp, stern. "I've talked with lady Penelope and Parker, but before that I'd talked to _you_. In Zurich, I asked you what happened. Apparently you left a lot out."

"I didn't _remember_. I still don't. I don't want to talk about it, there's nothing I need to tell you." John pauses, informed by a small radial in the upper corner of his vision that his breathing's quickened and his pulse along with it. It's some entirely unwarranted fight or flight response, because however badly that irrational part of him has been frightened; Kayo's not about to shoot him in his own home. "You can go," he tells her, standing to make for the door.

John's nearly a head taller than Kayo is, but with her arms folded and her stance firm, she's still the more imposing of the two of them and she stops him crossing the room. John's in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, trying to adjust to Tracy Island casual. He's not sure if he's ever been imposing. "I don't have anything to say," he repeats and shoulders past her to hold the door open.

She turns and green eyes narrow and he can't meet them, staring at the floor in a way that makes it look like he's lying. "I have to wonder, if between what you didn't tell me and what you claim not to remember, there wasn't something you found worth telling to Penelope and Parker. I know you came to harm on my watch, John, and I'm sorry for that. Honestly I am. But my job is to protect this family. _Your_ family. If you can tell me anything that might help accomplish that-"

"I can't." He gestures towards the door again and shakes his head. "I can't talk about this, I can't. Not with you. Please go. Please."

Her jaw tightens slightly and John can tell he's frustrated her. He doesn't care, he just wants the encounter to end. "Fine," she capitulates, and adjusts her belt as she crosses the room to the door. "I'm heading to the mainland. If you suddenly have an attack of memory or conscience, you know how to reach me. If you don't want to talk to _me_ , then consider talking to Penelope or Parker. Because _they're_ the ones who asked me to find out if you had anything else you needed to say."

Kayo leaves without a further word, leaves John to close the door behind her. He stays for a long time with his hand on the handle, until the little icon in his vision has gone far away, further than any of his brothers. Outside his window, Thunderbird Shadow arcs across the sky.


	14. there's palmistry at play here

MAX makes coffee, but not very well, and Brains has a display that tracks the movement of Tracys around the island just the same as John does. They're both the sort of people who find that sort of thing useful. So there's a beaker of water boiling on a Bunsen burner and a French press full of freshly ground beans waiting, when the elevator door dings open and John finally shows his face.

"H-hello!" Brains calls, and waves from the table where he's set up coffee cups and cream and sugar. It's a strange little vignette in the middle of the hangar where Brains has set up shop, a small slice of domesticity in a vaulted chamber full of white halogen light and high, craggy stone ceilings. Brains' lab is an ephemeral place, and exists wherever he's set up shop for whatever project is current. Today he's made himself comfortable in the hangar below TB3's looming red bulk. There's a stool set up across from Brains' own, and he stands when John approaches. This is the awkward part. "I h-hope you don't mind if I don't hug you," he offers. "B-but it's been quite a l-long time and though we're quite good friends, I'm not sure it wouldn't be a rather clumsy encounter."

This gets a grin out of John and he extends a hand across the table as he takes his seat. "Hearty handshake'd probably do," he agrees. "It's good to see you."

Brains clasps his hand firmly and warmly, for all his slight awkwardness, it's a genuine relief to see John again. "W-welcome home."

"Thanks."

Pleasantries observed, Brains busies himself with coffee, pours water over rich brown coffee grounds, fills the air with the heady scent of his custom blend of beans from three separate continents, chocolate and caramel and the very faintest hint of woodsmoke. He rambles cheerfully about roasting and relative acidity and flavor extraction. John listens with his chin in his hands and legitimate interest, until Brains has filled a pair of mugs nearly to the top with what's likely the best cup of coffee John's had in a while.

This is lightened with a splash of milk and sweetened with a cube of sugar, and as it cools John holds his hands out, palms up, and displays the scars that run down his fingers, the slits in his wrists where all his hardware was pulled out. "They did a bit of a number on me," he admits, and sounds abashed, though he has no reason to be. "I guess I never figured on anyone but _you_ ever pulling them out."

"G-good heavens," Brains murmurs, and pushes his glasses up as he leans in for a closer look. "Oh, this was a dreadful job. I-if they had just contacted me I could've g-given them the protocols for removal, there was really n-no n-need for so much damage."

"I've been told they were in a hurry."

Brains gently takes John's left hand, carefully turns and manipulates the first and third fingers, probes the scar tissue on his wrist. He's a man of science, but there's palmistry at play here, his fingertips rove over love, life and heart lines, and find John's hands a reflection of what he's been through. "How's the feeling in them? Tightness, numbness, pain?"

John flexes his fingers, twitches the ring finger on his left hand. "This one's numb from the first knuckle to the tip. Uh, the middle finger on the right's been tight and sore, but it's loosening up. The thumb's not got its full range of motion, but I don't know, that might pass."

"I can image them, take a full scan of w-what's been damaged, and submit it to a doctor. B-but you'll mostly likely need to see a specialist to have them properly treated, if surgery's necessary. I'm v-very sorry, John. Are they quite painful?"

He shakes his head and withdraws his hands, stretches his fingers again and then wraps them around the mug in front of him. "No. It's annoying, but none of it's terribly painful. I wanted to ask you if you think you could wire them back up."

This strikes Brains as a strange request and he has a sip of his own cup of coffee, thoughtful and cautious as he asks, "M-may I ask why? So soon after this degree of d-damage, I would think you'd want to let them heal the whole way. I w-would be hesitant to do anything before they've been evaluated by a specialist."

It's the first and third fingers on his left hand, the thumb, middle and pinky on his right. John holds his hands out again, flexes the undamaged digits. "Install them in the off-fingers. There's been no damage there, those are all fine. You didn't do any harm last time, you won't do any now. The wrists aren't bad, you can wire the batteries in further down if you have to. If it's just a matter of threading bio-filament through the venous network in the palm, then it won't be much worse than last time. Right?"

"N-not in theory. A-are you quite sure?" Brains pauses a moment, shifts in his chair, made a little uncomfortable by the intensity of the conversation. "I _did_ ask why, and you r-rather neatly avoided the question," he points out, but kindly, not meaning to put his friend on the spot. Just concerned.

A beat of hesitation and then John shrugs, looks deliberately past Brains, doesn't meet his gaze. "I thought," he says, apparently taking a pointed interest in MAX, idling next to Brains' engineering rig, "-I don't know. I thought it might help me feel as though things are...are starting to get back to normal. Everything keeps playing itself back over in my head, and I can't stop that. I'm getting used to it. But I just, I keep getting fixated on the way everything feels _wrong_. I didn't get to do any of this on my own terms and I haven't got any fixed point of reference anymore. I can't get zero-G back any time soon, my station's dead in orbit, and-and just my whole life. I've lost my sense of time and place, and I'm just-I'm trying to build it back up from the inside out, I guess."

"O-oh, my friend," Brains murmurs in sympathy, and it occurs to him that this is possibly the first time anyone's heard anything of the kind, from John. "D-do...I don't know if anyone's made the suggestion-do you suppose it might help to talk to someone? If you aren't...ah. If you aren't...adjusting?" This seems like a horribly understated way to label what sounds as though it might be some sort of delayed response to trauma. "If you...if you find you're...ah, there's no good word for this, is there?"

The arch of John's eyebrow in response is sardonic and then he sighs and shakes his head. He chuckles a little, lightens the mood, and shakes his head again. "No. None that I've found. I only seem to be able to say that I don't really want to talk about it. That's true, anyway."

"You know what I m-mean. If you need any further help, John, you know no one would hesitate to provide it. There's no shame in n-needing to talk." Brains clears his throat rather awkwardly and swirls the dregs of his cup of coffee in the bottom of the mug. "E-even if it's just me. I'm q-quite willing to listen, John, if that's all It would take."

"I know." And his smile is genuine, if a little sad. "And thank you. I don't know if I'm ready yet. But...I mean, if you'd be willing to-"

Brains glances at John's hands again, resting on the table in front of him. "I suppose I would be doing it eventually anyway," he agrees. "I-I'll need to put together the c-correct medical kit and I'll need to d-dig up the specs from l-last time. H-how soon do you feel you'd like it done?"

"As soon as you're ready."

The decision made, there's no reason to be indecisive about it any longer. Brains, at the end of the day, is well aware who he works for. "V-very well. If you'd like to come back then, or...?"

"There's something else."

"Oh?"

A peculiar sort of silence falls, in the long moments it takes John to continue. Brains is afforded a few moments to really _look_ at John, and seems to observe him at the edge of some precipice, some question he doesn't want to ask. Brains is preparing himself, mentally, for the tone he thinks the discussion will take, but-

John surprises him, with the softness of his voice and the way he sounds strained when he asks, haltingly, "I'd like you to run a few tests. Not medical-I mean, not really. Not quite. Just...there's...I mean, I don't know. It's suspicion, mostly, at this point. Well-founded, I think."

There's a shock of cold anxiety through Brains' system and he frowns, abruptly and deeply concerned. For all his experience, for all his intelligence and skill, he isn't a medical doctor. The notion that John might need one is something that will need to be addressed, and not by him. "Is something the matter, John?"

"A lot of little things. Just, I didn't know how much of it was just...just emotional shock, or whatever it is. Just the psychological side. I don't know though, with this much distance and with everything that's gone on, I-" John takes a deep breath and visibly steels himself, his voice steadies as he continues. "I can't focus. Not like I should be able to. I lose my train of thought and I ramble and I drift out of conversations. I say things I don't mean to, or other times I just-I can't find the words. And my memory...there are gaps. Not just around the whole thing at the hospital, I mean since then. I'll lose a few minutes, or I'll lose a whole hour. Other things just don't stick. I had to start taking notes trying to keep track of everything in New York, and I was still lost half the time. I have no idea what got said or...or whether I might've changed the resolution." His eyes dart up from where they've fixed on the half full mug between his hands and Brains sees the fear in them, feels it tear through his heart. "I mean, I don't know. I just, I think maybe something's wrong."

"You were very sick," Brains says, and curses himself for stating something so banal and obvious. He takes his glasses off and rubs them on his shirt, coughs to cover the awkwardness of the statement, tries to pick it back up in a meaningful way, "Y-you had several seizures, you ran an extremely h-high fever. T-there are tests that can be done. O-of course. But-"

"I can't evaluate it myself, I don't trust my own bias."

Brains shakes his head. "W-well, no, of course not. B-but John, it might...I would have to recommend, in all honestly, that you see a p-proper doctor. We can have someone cleared and brought to the island, a professional should m-make this observation. I would just be ticking boxes and making an assessment according to whatever protocols are available. A doctor would b-be better prepared to say how to move forward. I'm sure there are therapies that would be available."

"Maybe." John's shoulders set and he meets Brains' gaze, "But if this is what I'm going to be told, I don't want to be told by a stranger. As a friend, Brains-"

"Of c-course," Brains answers hastily, cutting him off and rising, gathering up coffee cups and the rest of the clutter. Cups of coffee together, as friends do. But that pretense can be pushed aside, he needs to be a professional now, and his own voice steadies, loses its stammer. "Of course, John. I'll download the appropriate literature."

"Thanks, Brains."

"Of course," Brains repeats, and doesn't mean it. John's asked him as a friend, but this is something Brains would hate to have to tell a friend. This is something he has to be ordered to tell one of his employers.


	15. no longer a secret

Dad's desk is where John ends up, at three in the morning, with moonlight slanting down over the island, and bandages wound round his fingers again. They hurt but he doesn't feel them, because Dad's desk contained a bottle of Dad's scotch, and John's been at it for a few hours now, up long past the time everyone else had gone to bed. There are three hundred pages worth of his thesis in his lap and he's about halfway through.

It makes about as much sense drunk as it did sober.

Not a definitive diagnosis, Brains had said. He's not a doctor, it's still early days. _This_ kind of trauma, following _that_ kind of illness, it's really not easy to judge the line between the temporary and the permanent. Time, more than anything else, is what he thinks John needs. And to be seen by someone with the appropriate credentials, who can make better than just educated guesses.

Probably that's all true. Brains is smarter than John is, _especially_ now-this is a bitter pill of a thought that gets washed down with a throat-numbing swallow of whisky-and wiser, too. There are good reasons John had gone to him, even knowing beforehand what he was likely to be told.

It hadn't been unexpected. His suspicions were, as he'd said, well founded. More than anything else, John's always been an expert in his own mind. He'd known something was wrong-and tried to deny it, tried to cover it up, even to himself. Rolling the feeling of numb dullness along, diluting the real reason for it in whatever handily available liquor presented itself. Or retreating into his tendency towards reticence, not saying anything rather than saying something wrong and tipping his hand. Pretending he's forgotten things instead of admitting that he just doesn't know if what he remembers is remembered _right_.

But the time for that has passed. Even calm and safe and sober, it's empirically clear that John can't _think_ the way he used to. There's _data_ now. And so it's pain and fear and anguish that has him at his father's desk, reading words he wrote, the gospel of something he believes with his whole heart, but can no longer find the words to explain.

John doesn't know it about each of his brothers, but they've all had their Gethsemane here. Dad's desk is a place for long, dark nights of the soul, a place for the agony of truth.

Only John's truth is different than his brothers', because the scotch he's drinking belongs to a man who's apparently had a resurrection, and hasn't bothered to tell anyone about it.

Not, of course, that he knows what to do with that information.

Further, he's been explicitly told _not_ to do anything with that information. To keep it close and safe and secret, play it tight to the vest, because the Lady Penelope is a liar, and when she tells the truth, _that's_ when you have to worry. The things that Penelope knows to be true are the things that are dangerous to know.

The secret he'd tried to keep had saved his life. But he's in the depths of the garden now, and for all that his _brain_ doesn't work, there's something about thirty-year-old McCallan that unmuddies a lot of self-deception. So the truth is, maybe John's secret is what he'd been nearly killed for in the first place.

EOS isn't a person, and she's no longer a secret. And she's wanted by a man who knows what she is and what she's capable of, and who'll use her for the worst possible purposes. John's never known from good or evil, and he doesn't know if what he remembers is real, a leering face and a disembodied voice and the promise that he would take the only thing John has that's worth protecting.

If it's true-

If it's true, maybe she's better destroyed. Maybe she'd sooner be nothing than be enslaved by a madman. Maybe John wouldn't have been able to protect her anyway, against a force of such malice and hatred. Maybe if none of this had happened he would know what to do.

In Dad's chair, at Dad's desk, with Dad's liquor in Dad's absence, John wonders for the first time if his Dad would know what to do.

Because Dad's not dead. Or, if Dad is dead, he hadn't been dead when he'd been supposed to be dead. John had been supposed to be dead. Is supposed to be dead. John was supposed to die in space. Malaria, in _space_. On Thunderbird Five, feverish and choking and dying, with his brain flickering in and out, with his limbs seizing and his entire body failing him. Why, of everything, he remembers _that_. Pressed hard against clear glass, blood sticky against his face, an eye above and an eye below. Dying. Of _malaria_. Scott remembers, about malaria. John had been sitting on their mother's lap, it had been on TV. A big ceremony, somewhere far away. Awards, for something important. Malaria, Dad had cured malaria.

Of course that would get his attention.

Dead, John had been supposed to be dead, to catch his father's attention. His father must be somewhere out in the world with his attention, waiting to be caught.

Right? That had been said. John thinks. He thinks so. Tries to, anyway.

But it's just another thing John's not sure he remembers. Staring at a glass half-empty, and with its contents by volume worth about two hundred and twenty-one dollars-John would doubt his memory sober, but on his third glass of something too strong for him in the first place, he barely even _remembers_ his father.

Handily, his father's shadow presents itself at the top of the stairs, and his father's first son scares his second half to death. A chair screeches backward and a glass shatters on the floor and the room fills with the scent of alcohol.


	16. in their absent father's place

Sometimes Scott runs into Grandma, walking the halls past midnight. They both do it, but not usually in tandem. They're not synced up. Grandma checks bedrooms, Scott roams the house. Scott knows it for a fact that Grandma still checks the bedroom that had long since stopped being John's, because it's right below his, and he always hears the door open and softly shut.

Scott doesn't check bedrooms. Scott checks TB2's hangar, for Virgil working late into the night. He checks the pool for Gordon, and if he finds him having a leisurely late-night swim, there's usually a desparate plea for his brother to _put some damn trunks on_. This has never once been honored and is almost always laughed at. This is, incidentally, also how Lady Penelope knows he's a natural blonde, because the moon is bright on Tracy Island, and Gordon's not used to visiting nobility, in a guest room that faces the pool.

Alan sleepwalks, but reliably he sleepwalks over to the lounge and parks himself in his chair, ready for launch. It's usually easy enough to herd him back to bed.

Virgil's the one who finds Scott, and he finds him at Dad's desk when he does.

So that's where Scott had been heading, when he'd startled John. He'd made his rounds of the hangars, the pool, then up to the the lounge. There's only one more stop and it's Scott's. The moon's high and bright over the island, and the upper floor is cast in Scott's colour, blue and black and silver.

But there'd been a muffled yell and shattered glass and then the smoky, familiar scent of scotch. Then there'd been his brother's bright, not-really-green eyes, glinting at him in the dark over the top of Dad's desk.

Scott's not sure where he and John stand, staring at each other across the lounge. It's quiet in the house and Scott can hear John breathing, after being startled by the sight of him. For a moment Scott almost turns and goes back downstairs, goes to fetch Virgil and have _him_ deal with this. But no. He's the older brother, and the only older brother that John's got.

And finding him like this, in their absent father's place, clearly in need of _someone_ -well. Scott's the only big brother John's got, and they have a lot that needs to be talked about. So Scott clears his throat and crosses the room and takes a seat on the desktop, pulls the bottle of whisky away from the edge. There's broken glass at his brother's feet and John's just sitting, still and silent, staring at his hands in his lap. There's a thick sheaf of paper open in front of him, splattered with drops of amber liquor. If he notices, he doesn't seem to care.

So first of all-"I was saving that, you know, for when we found out what happened to him."

John's eyes are liquid, bright green when he meets Scott's gaze. This is more telling than the thickness of his voice when he answers, vaguely, "Oh."

Scott picks the bottle up and squints at the label for a few moments, mentally gauging just how much of it's gone. "You're just really, really drunk, huh?" he questions, and unscrews the lid from the bottle to take a sip of his own.

"Y-yeah'm. Mmm. Yeah. I am."

"Guess I don't blame you." Scott pulls the bottle back as John reaches for it again, and shakes his head. "No, John, I think that's enough." He puts the lid back on and returns it to a drawer of the desk, as his brother's hands return to the sheaf of paper in his lap and page slowly through it, his doctorate thesis. Something about complex AI. Scott's tried to read it, once or twice. It's over his head, the same way so much of John's life is. He sighs as he looks his brother over, and fails to find the words.

More than ever, it seems like there's a void between them. Scott and John have never been similar, but for a long time they were at least close. Growing up, John had just been next in line, a natural foil to his older brother. Calm and reticent where Scott had always been headstrong and bold. Coming into their father's grand project, John had become Scott's right-hand, trusted and capable. After their father's loss, they'd been natural partners in leadership. They work well together, always have.

But they're different. And when it comes to the question of what John cares about most in the world-more than Scott had ever known or could possibly have imagined-Scott just doesn't understand his brother. The reasons that John drinks alone in the dark are far, far different from the reasons that Scott does. And, only older brother or not, he doesn't know what to say.

It's John who speaks first, anyway, drunk and mumbling, half to himself. "I wish Dad was here."

Scott does too, but then, Scott almost always does. This the first time he's heard John say anything of the kind, though. John's grief for their father has always been remote, distant, the same way he has. "I miss him too, John."

"But I wish. Wish he was _here_. Scotty. _Here_." John's so rarely at a loss for words, he's so rarely inarticulate. Thinking back, Scott's not actually sure he's ever seen John _drunk_. Virgil, sure, Scott and Virgil will get into twelve-pack after work, and if it was a particularly taxing day, then they'll get into another one. More than once they've both gone stumbling to bed. Gordon, definitely. Let Gordon within range of the blender with a bottle of rum and there'll be boozy, slushy mixed drinks turning up on every countertop until he runs out of fruit. Gordon's a happy, bubbly drunk and, smaller and slighter than any of his brothers, he's got the tolerance for about two and a half banana daiquiris before he's three sheets to the wind. "Dad. Dad'd...would've...he'd know. Right? Dad knows about it. When it's important, Dad _knows_. Scott? Right?" A long, weighted pause. "She's really important. EOS. I know that. No one listened. _Listens_."

"I'm sorry, John," Scott says softly. "I really am, I'm so sorry."

"What would Dad've done?"

That's been the billion dollar question for the past three years. It's the thing Scott's asked himself every day, sometimes every _hour_. Scott's father is Scott's shadow, and he's with him everywhere he goes. "Johnny, if I knew, I'd have done it. I only did my best."

"There-there's not anything else you can do? W-we could-I could-if I could just...if someone would _listen_ -"

Scott doesn't know. And he knows his brother's going to keep throwing himself at that wall, trying to figure it out, if he's not stopped. So he just shakes his head and sighs. "You're not in any state for this conversation, John," he tells his brother, and gently tugs the thick sheaf of paper out of his hands, lays it atop the desk. "C'mon. Lie down, sleep it off."

"But, I-"

"Come on, John," Scott insists, and when John doesn't seem to have it in him to argue, Scott's more relieved than he can say.

The last time they talked, they argued. This is the first time Scott's seen his brother since John had stormed out of the office in New York, after the verdict had been passed down from the board of directors. It's only been a few days, but it feels like a lifetime. Scott supposes he should be grateful for benign, drunken compliance, should be grateful that John's not the sort of drunk who tips over the edge into brawling, scrapping, the way Gordon can. Or into maudlin weeping, the way Virgil gets. John's the sort of drunk who can be nagged and gently bullied over to the lounge and settled down on one of the couches.

And then it's just a question of watching him, because Scott can't bring himself to leave. That first responder training, hard-coded into all of them-the tipping point between sleep and unconsciousness is too easy to miss in an intoxicated party. Where other people are concerned, at least, Scott's nothing if not cautious. So he sits with his brother for another three hours, until dawn breaks over the island, and Gordon turns up in the lounge, on his way to the pool as usual.

Scott yawns and stretches in his seat, and sets John's thesis aside. He hasn't actually been reading it. He'd accidentally found his eyes drifting down the page once or twice, but he'd had to jerk his gaze upward, because he needs to stay awake and have an eye on his brother. He's let John go too long without anyone having an eye on him. "Morning, Gord."

"Yeah, barely. What, you still on New York time?" Brown eyes, clinical, take in the scene at a glance. First, or in this case, second responder. Gordon frowns as he eyes the broken glass and the towel Scott had left on the desk. He stares at John, with his arms latched tight around a pillow and his face buried against it, curled up on the couch. Then he raises an eyebrow at Scott and rubs his nose. "Jeez. If you two'd invited me, I'd have done up margaritas. Got out the cards, put the stereo on. Watched a highlight reel of my whirlwind press tour. Punched Virgil. Made a night of it. Or was it a big-kids only type party? Have you been here all night?"

Shaking his head, Scott rubs his eyes and glances at his comm on his wrist. "Mm. Not that long. Since three, maybe three-thirty."

"Jeez. Hey, here, head's up." Gordon's got a towel around his shoulders and he's in track pants and a t-shirt over his swimsuit. He's never without a bottle of water, and he tosses it across the room to Scott and then trots the steps down into the lounge to have a look at John. Scott gets up and stretches, pops every one of his thirty-two years down the length of aching vertebrae and groans. He drains Gordon's water bottle in a single go and then lays it aside, sighing.

Gordon squints at Scott and then has a moment of revelation, looking down at John, out of the world and snoring softly. "Oh _damn_. Scott, you're stone-cold sober, huh?" he questions, with a concerned little divot in between his eyebrows.

"Yeah."

"The room smells _flammable_."

Scott grimaces at the blond's wrinkled nose. Gordon really doesn't drink anything that doesn't taste like candy. "Yeah, some scotch got spilled. I got most of it, but you know. Expensive stuff. It lingers. Think it took up some of the finish off the floor."

"That's not all _John_? God. God _damn_ , how long's he been out?"

"It's only been three hours." Scott shakes his head and sighs, even as Gordon gently loosens his brother's grip on the pillow and takes a pulse and gauges respiration, peers at fingernails and lips and reassures himself about alcohol poisoning and the lack of it. "I think he's okay," Scott volunteers, as though he hadn't done the same thing not fifteen minutes earlier.

Gordon shakes his head and parks himself in the chair beside the couch, and makes it clear he's taking over. "You're wrong there, if he's drinking like _this_. I think he's really, really _not_ okay. Aw, Johnny. Oh man."

Scott shifts and shrugs, uncomfortable. "Yeah. Well. I mean, he's been through a lot."

Gordon's entirely too sharp for his own good, sometimes, and he chews his lower lip. "This wasn't that, though, was it? This is EOS." For a few more moments they're both watching John and thinking separate but similar thoughts about what's put him in this state. Gordon clears his throat and softly breaks the silence, "They...they're really gonna delete her. There's nothing we can do anymore. There's not, is there? Right? She was really important to him. And they're gonna delete her. And now he's just waiting for that."

It's Gordon, not John, who breaks the whole situation down, and makes Scott feel incredibly old with his statement. And an instant later he feels impossibly young, as he wishes for their father, more than John ever has. "Yeah. I guess he is."

Scott's been studiously not letting it in, the thought of the way John must feel. Gordon's not going to be able to help it, sitting beside his brother at the lowest point in his life. Gordon's always been more empathetic than really suits their line of work. It's the opposite trait to the detachment that has John excel at it. There's a sort of grief by proxy that's hitting him now, and there's real sorrow in his voice when he says, quietly, "Alan said it'd break his heart. Sometimes I forget John has one. God. I'd drink too, if it was me."

There are another few moments of silence between them, before Gordon sniffles and coughs and clears his throat, and pretends like he's not the sort of person who wears his heart on his sleeve, while wondering about the hearts of others. "I got this, Scott. You wanna get to bed, I'll sit here. Virgil be up in a bit, he's probably a softer touch for hangovers than I am. I can't really suppress the impulse to pitch him in the pool, and pretend like that'd help."

Scott cracks a grin, insincere though it is, because it's what Gordon expects. Just a band aid for the seriousness of the situation. "Thanks. I hope he feels better."

"Hope whatever you want, he's gonna feel like shit." Gordon shakes his head and puts his feet up, gives another glance at John, still dead to the world. "But at least he's home. And not dying of malaria. And not kidnapped and murdered by the Hood. Or under arrest by the GDF. So, you know. Little victories. Make a broken heart seem like a scraped knee. We'll patch him up."

"Yeah," Scott answers, and hopes it's true. It's easy to forget that John has a heart, let alone that it's possible to break it. "I hope so."


	17. so damn hard to get a read on you

It's two of Virgil's fistfuls of kale (from Alan it would take three), ice, coconut milk, ground up flax seed, a banana and an obscene amount of honey. The blender's high-powered, makes short work of it, but the blades inside the jar may as well be inside John's skull for the way the sound makes his head hurt.

"I don't want that," he mutters, even as Virgil ignores him, pouring a green ribbon of liquid from the blender into a tall, frosted glass. He adds a crazy straw. And a cocktail umbrella. And he slides it across the bar and serves it with folded arms and an expression that brooks no argument from his elder brother.

"Tough. Scott says he won't see you 'til you've eaten something, and anyway you're hungover as hell. It's Gordon's recipe. Works miracles."

"It's _green_."

" _You're_ green."

That's true. Or, if it's not literally true, he certainly feels like it could be. Pounding head, aching body, and nausea, nausea, nausea. John's breathing very deliberately through his mouth and not his nose, and curlicued straw and little paper umbrella or not, the green concoction Virgil's pushing seems like a bad idea.

The rocket fuel their father had kept in his desk disguised as scotch had been a pretty bad idea, too. This seems like cause for comment as John continues to side-eye the tall green glass. He's slouched halfway over the table, and then it just seems easier to slouch the rest of the way over the table as he sighs and shuts his eyes. "I have bad ideas. My brain doesn't work."

Virgil slides the glass closer and butts it up against John's forehead. Insistently. Several times. It's damp and unpleasantly cold and John groans at him in protest. "Maybe. I don't know about that. Probably your brain could use some electrolytes, though. I put some protein powder in there, and some B12. If you're _very_ good and finish the whole thing, I'll let you hit the pure oxygen from TB2's emergency supply."

"I don't want oxygen. It doesn't actually fix anything, that's a myth. Can't I have toast?"

"If you don't believe _oxygen_ helps, I don't know why you think toast'll do any damn good. No toast, smoothie first." He tugs John's hand out from underneath his head, wraps his fingers around the glass. "C'mon."

There's no arguing with Virgil. The most well-reasoned opposition falls apart in front of him, because he folds his arms, plants his feet, and decides that things are going to be done his way. So never mind that the sight of the column of green sludge makes John want to vomit, never mind that the cold's going to worsen his headache, never mind that he doesn't even _like_ coconut. Never mind that a crazy straw and cocktail umbrella will not in anyway ease the passage of a concoction so thick that the aforementioned straw stands up straight in the middle of it.

John groans and disengages both straw and umbrella. "This won't help," he insists, even as he downs the first third and shudders bodily. " _Christ_."

Virgil swipes at the ring of condensation left on the counter with a dish towel and shrugs. "Nothing will actually _help_ , John. It's a hangover. But you were blackout drunk on an empty stomach, so we're gonna sit here until there's some protein and glucose in you."

"Gordon made this up? It tastes like death."

"Gordon's a bit crazy about kale. It tastes fine, _you_ just _feel_ like death. Down the hatch, champ, let's go."

John manages another mouthful and gags, halfway choking on a chunk of stem that didn't quite get blended. "I don't want to talk to Scott this badly."

That's not true. That's a blatant lie, he _needs_ to talk to Scott. A message had buzzed on his wrist that morning and then flared in front of his eyes as he'd opened them, floating a foot in front of his face. A memo from Fischler Industries, summoning him to the company headquarters in Auckland. John had deleted it as soon as he'd read it, then gone further into the Island's server and scrubbed all trace of its passage. He'd done it all lying flat on his back on a couch in the lounge, with Gordon watching, not commenting, as he'd flicked his fingers through the air and manipulated his invisible HUD. Then he'd been bullied up and out of the lounge for a shower, and then deposited in the kitchen before Grandma and Alan got a look at him. Probably he ought to be at least moderately grateful for that.

The same HUD is telling him that his heartrate's up and his blood pressure's down and that the glass in front of him still contains approximately four-hundred and thirty milliliters of green sludge. It pings Virgil, a meter and a half in front of him. Scott's pacing the floor above, waiting in the lounge. Alan's in the loft overhead. He's got a handful of background processes running on a partitioned drive, connected only to his comm, and these display progress updates periodically. All of this is easier to zone out and pay attention to, and John knows it's more than just the hangover that has his brain slipping its tether and drifting.

Until Virgil puts a hand through a blue readout floating in the middle of John's field of view, and snaps his fingers. "Hey. Space cadet. Halfway done. C'mon, Scott wants a word and I'm babysitting you instead of doing a re haul of my fuel lines. Your hungover ass is not very engaging company when I've got an optimal refueling manifold on the brain."

"Sorry."

Virgil grunts at this and swipes at the counter again as John manages another swallow from the glass in front of him. "Yeah, well. I know TB5 runs dry and that's laudable, but you've been at one bottle or another since you got out of the hospital, and frankly it's scary as hell."

"I haven't-"

There's no arguing with Virgil. He interrupts before John can formulate any kind of argument, "Yeah, no. Look, it's okay if you're not all right. D'you know that? You can be a mess, John, everyone expects it. But you can't sit up until three in the morning drinking Dad's scotch until you black out. What the hell brought that on?"

There's a moment, just a brief, flicker of a moment, when John's seized by the urge to spill out everything that's lurking beneath the surface of his broken brain. EOS and their father and the fact that drunkenness drowns the way he feels when he's sober, gives him an excuse. That he's on the edge of something, the edge of a resolution he'd come to before he'd known just how hard it would be to follow through. But instead he shakes his head and finishes the last of what he's been given, bitter and cloyingly sweet and not helpful in the least. And his brother, solid, dependable Virgil, who only ever means well, but who won't understand. "...Sorry."

"Man, John, don't apologize to _me_. It's just-God, you don't seem like yourself, lately. I know it's a big adjustment being back home, and I know a hell of a lot happened, but it's so damn hard to get a read on you. No one knows if we should be giving you space or if you need someone to hang around with or...hell, anything else. We all wanna help, but-I guess it's just hard to know what's really wrong. Do _you_ know what's wrong?"

"Do you want a list? I have a list," John answers, more sarcastically than he means to, stares at the glass between his bandaged fingers. He shrugs and rubs at his eyes, sends flares of pressure across the display projecting onto his retinas. "I dunno, Virge. I can't get a read on me either. Maybe I just wanted not to have a list for a little while. I know it was a mistake, I won't do it again. Can't afford to do it again. I'm told it was like two and a half grand worth of scotch." He pauses. "Brains thinks I should talk to somebody."

Virgil nods at this and pulls the emptied glass away. "Well, I think I agree with that. I think maybe you could do worse than starting with Scott. And hey! Look! You've met the minimum requirement for a conversation with Scott. Congratulations."

John has to remind himself that it's Scott who wants to talk to _him_ , and that it's just a coincidence that he happens to want to talk to Scott. "I'm gonna hear about two and a half grand worth of Dad's scotch," he predicts, a little morose.

"D'you want a list of what you're gonna hear about? I have a list," Virgil quotes, with a sort of wry half-grin. "You haven"t talked to Scott for a week, so he's been talking to _me_."

John manages to approximate a chuckle and pushes his stool back from the kitchen counter. "I imagine it's pretty similar to my own, but thanks." He pauses a moment and he's still hungover, still uncertain of the sanctity of his mind, and hoping that he can put Scott off long enough to accomplish his own goals. But Virgil only ever means well, and he's earned some reassurance. So he lies through his teeth, because he's not grateful, not happy that there's the weight of something horrid and green and unhelpful, sitting on top of the nausea and anxiety, heavy in his gut. "Really, thank you. I hope I'm less of a wreck than it looks like."

The look Virgil gives him up and down implies that he looks like a hell of a wreck. And there's something between sympathy and pity when he answers, "Yeah, John. Me too."


	18. that secret, seldom spoken creed

Scott doesn't check bedrooms, and Alan doesn't always sleepwalk over to his bucket seat, ready for launch. Sometimes, fully awake, he wanders into the lounge and clambers up into the loft, and sits in a big armchair that used to be their father's. Sometimes he reads, sometimes he pretends he can glean some higher meaning out of whatever Virgil's latest canvas depicts, but most often he just sits and watches the stars.

TB5 has an orbital period of ninety minutes. Alan knows how to spot it. On the nights he wanders out of bed, Alan marks how many hours of sleep he loses by how many times TB5 arcs across the sky. It still does so without its pilot. Empty and hollow, TB5 still falls through orbit on a pre-appointed path, and every time it passes, Alan makes the wish that things will be okay.

John wandered into the lounge at around midnight, and Alan almost, _almost_ called out to him. He'd been avoiding John. He hadn't meant to, at first. It had just been so strange to see his brother out of his natural element and to come to the abrupt, frightening realization that something about him had fundamentally altered. Alan had been too young to remember much about his brothers, after their mother died. He'd been too wrapped up in his own grief after their father's disappearance to notice much about his brothers, after their father disappeared. But he has a crystal clear recollection of standing in TB3's cargo hold, with his hands on John's shoulders, and really seeing his brother, maybe for the first time. Realizing that John has a carefully crafted persona that he wears like armor, and that without it, he's far more fragile and far more human than Alan really wants his big brother to be.

So he hadn't called out. He'd just sat in silence, watching John drink, and wishing on his brother's star for his brother to get better.

It seems innocuous, drinking. Alan's tried it once or twice and made himself viciously sick, and had Gordon to deal with. Gordon is reliably strict and unsympathetic and will lean against the bathroom door while his brother heaves his guts out, but will also promise not to tell Scott and then offer a bright green smoothie that he says cures hangovers. It does not, and Alan's fairly sure it exists mostly as a punishment for the morning after, but he's choked it down all the same and been grateful to be taken care of.

But Scott had shown up and Alan had curled himself up smaller and quieter and listened, hating what he'd heard. John's not supposed to _need_ taking care of. He'd watched Scott and hated _him_ , a little bit, for having broken John out of the innocent-seeming tableau of a drink at their father's desk, quietly reading. That hadn't been so bad, Alan had almost found it sort of comforting. Familiar; John as an echo of their father. But Scott had shown up and startled him, shattered the glass and filled the room with the scent of liquor, revealed him to be broken and stumbling and scarcely coherent. With his shields down and his armor off, grieving something that hasn't yet happened.

Alan had fallen asleep around the same time John had, worn out and weary with anxiety, heartsick. It had been the sort of sleep that one blinks into and then blinks right back out of, hours later. He'd woken to the sound of Gordon's voice, shaking and gently coaxing John awake, with the sun already mid-morning high. For a moment Alan had been afraid that John would be on the receiving end of the same sort of utterly uncompassionate treatment that Alan's hangovers have been treated with in the past, but Gordon had only been gentle and patient and kind. Drowsy and wedged in his armchair, Alan had drifted off back to sleep with sunlight slanting through the windows overhead, a warm patch after a long, dark night. He's got the emotional equivalent of his brother's hangover, and he just wants warmth and peace and quiet. For a while, he gets it.

He's half awake when Scott comes back into the lounge and parks himself at Dad's desk, and looks like he belongs there. He wakes the rest of the way up when John trudges up the stairs from the kitchen, pale and still moving like gravity's chosen to victimize him personally, but alert and sober. John's got a bottle of water in his long-fingered hands, and he drops to sit on the couch nearest to Dad's desk, while Scott leans over the desktop and sighs.

And Alan's been here before, sitting outside a conversation between his two eldest brothers. The _first_ conversation, the first time EOS had been discussed between them, the first time they'd chosen their opposing sides. Neither of them could have known it would come to this. The pair of them are the two people Alan looks up to most in the whole world, and quietly, though TB5's not visible overhead to wish on, Alan's just desperately hoping that they can come to some sort of resolution. He's stiff and sore from a night in an armchair, and probably he shouldn't be listening in, probably it's rude and deceitful, but he doesn't care. He needs to hear this conversation as much as Scott and John need to have it. He closes his eyes and curls up tighter and just listens, the way he hadn't been able to, that first time.

Scott, as he had that first time, breaks the silence, quiet and gentle like Gordon had been. Kind and patient, in a way that has Alan practically melting with relief. "You remember much of last night, John?"

"No."

"Kinda thought not. I have to tell you, I don't want you to do that again."

"I admit I've made better decisions." There's the sound of the cap popping up on John's bottle of water, and a long slow draught from it. John sighs at the end and snaps it closed again. "Seemed like a good idea at the time."

"I mean it, John." There's a rare edge of sternness to Scott's tone, countering the rare note of flippancy from John. Command is one thing. Decisiveness. But sternness is rare, sternness makes him sound like their father. Appropriately. "I'm dead serious, that's the most frightening thing I think I've ever seen you do. I can't shake the feeling that if I hadn't come along you'd have poisoned yourself. Please, John. Don't do that again."

"You're worried about me."

"We're _all_ worried about you."

"I suppose that's reasonable."

Alan, not having considered the possibility that his brother might've drank himself to death, alone, in the `dark, is more frightened than he's ever been in his entire life. He climbs carefully down from his chair and scoots over to the edge of the loft, unnoticed, so he can get a better look at his brothers. Scott's watching John, but John's fixed his attention on the bottle in his hands, half full and refracting the white lines of bandages around his fingers.

Scott gets up, circles around to the lounge and sits down at the edge of the conversation pit, puts himself in John's field of view. "I talked to Brains," he admits, as though this is something substantial.

Apparently it is, because it gets John's attention. He's facing away, but Alan can see the concern on Scott's features. "Yeah. I guess that doesn't surprise me. Well, he's not a doctor. it's not like I'm entitled to confidentiality. What'd he have to say?"

"He told me because I asked and because he agrees that I should know, not because he broke any kind of confidence of his own accord. There's not a single person here who isn't concerned for you, John, Brains included. Brains _especially_ , seeing as he's the only person you've actually gone to talk to."

"And?" John presses and Alan winces at the way he sounds quiet, like he knows what Scott's been told and doesn't want to hear it again.

Scott shifts and lowers himself to sit on the couch next to John. He keeps his distance, keeps his posture casual as he leans against the back of it, props his arm up. Looks for all the world like he's not asking if John's falling apart. "Well, the words _post traumatic_ might've been used. Not incorrectly, if you want my opinion."

"Mm."

"It's fine if you don't. I'd like yours, though."

"I'm not labouring under the illusion that I'm handling this well."

This gets a frustrated sigh from Scott. "You're not obligated to meet any kind of standard for coping with what happened, John. If it's PTSD, then it's PTSD. It happens."

"It's not PTSD."

Scott coughs awkwardly and Alan's more than a little unnerved by the dark, sharp edge to John's voice. "I think maybe that's something a professional should-"

"The closest thing I have to a soulmate is about to be wiped out of existence, and that pales in comparison to anything that's happened to _me_. So no, Scott, I'm not copping to PTSD. If I'm fucked up because of what happened, then I'll go to pieces on my own damn time. But _her_ time's almost up, and I failed her."

"John, for Christ's sakes-"

" _No_. Are you asking me what's wrong, or are you telling me? You wanna know what this is? I failed someone who needed me. She's going to be worse than dead. Can you comprehend that? Can you imagine being obliterated so completely that there's just nothing _left_? Because they can do that. They're _going_ to do that. Because _I failed._ "

Scott's visibly pained by this and he's on the backfoot as John shoves himself up off the couch, paces like a caged cat. And Alan realizes that he's seen this before. He's seen this play out with Gordon, with Virgil-he's only been in John's position once. And he knows what Scott's about to say.

"We can't save everybody."

It's always a phrase that drops like molten lead into water, heavy and final and frozen in time, that moment of conceded defeat. That secret, seldom-spoken creed of International Rescue, the thing they all need to accept if they hope to carry on. Alan's wracking his brain, trying to remember a circumstance when John would've heard it. Trying to remember if John's ever been the weak link in the chain, ever been the one to fail. Not within his memory.

Time starts again as John turns and towers over Scott, who's remained seated as a gesture of humility or apology or deference to his brother's broken heart. His failure. There are high points of colour on John's cheeks and his eyes flare bright, unnatural green. His hands have clenched at his sides, bandages tightening around his fingers and he's furious. He's angry the way almost no one ever sees him. Alan can feel his heart thudding against his ribs, pounding in his ears.

"Did you try?" he asks, his voice soft, dangerous. "Did you really, honestly try to understand what she means? Because she's not part of _everyone_. She's not part of anything, she's _alone_. You can't even begin to understand _how_ alone. I haven't been able to decide if none of you understand or if none of you care. But I've got it wrong. None of you are stupid, and it's not a difficult concept. And she's been-she-she's been part of your lives, too. In a small way, not like she was part of mine. But I know she didn't mean _nothing_. So it's worse. All of you understand. And all of you chose not to care."

"John, I'm sorry." Scott gets to his feet, spreads his hands, conciliatory. "I'm sorry. I told you last night, and I know you don't remember. But I meant it then, and I mean it now. I'm sorry. I really am, John, I swear I did what I could. I'm not Dad. Dad would've done more, would've done it better, Dad wouldn't have let you down."

The mention of their father gets a bizarre, manic grin out of John. "You want to know what I know about _Dad_?"

Then there's an awful, hysterical sort of laugh and for the second time, Alan's gone cold all over with fear of and for his brother, and the way he's changed. The way he keeps changing and the way Alan, least of anybody, doesn't know how to help him. From the beginning of everything with EOS, that's all Alan had wished for. Just that someone would finally understand how to help his brother.

And for the first time in years (but fewer years than he'd like to admit), Alan can't help but break down sobbing, loud and helpless and drawing the attention he's so carefully avoided up to now.


	19. bury grief under trauma

_Oh, Johnathan. Sweetheart, you made the baby cry. Don't fight with your brother._

There's only one person who was ever supposed to call him by the name that isn't his. When she did, it was always a mistake, a slip of the tongue, her own memory echoing with _her_ father's name, and her long ago childhood. Scott is his father's shadow. John is his mother's.

And the memory of her voice in his head jerks him out of a fit of irrational, rising anger-the temper that he's been less and less able to control. John freezes and his brain scrabbles at the slippery slope of memory, casting about for the last thing he'd said and the thing he'd been _about_ to say. The thing he's not _supposed_ to say, about his father and how false his absence is.

He hasn't said it, but it doesn't matter anyway, because he and Scott have committed that ultimate transgression: they've made the baby cry.

Neither of them had noticed him. Alan, on occasion, is capable of drawing very little attention to himself. For a fragment of a moment, John and Scott are just staring at each other. Somehow it's plain that they've both drawn the same sort of memory from the depths of childhood, the sound of their youngest brother, with his hand clapped over his mouth and big teary blue eyes, trying very hard to stop crying.

Nothing could've drained the fight out of the room faster, but Alan's only just gotten started, sniffling viciously and mastering himself as he clambers to his feet and glowers down into the lounge " _Stop it_!"

The two oldest aren't often called out on their behavior. Grandma rarely has reason to knock heads together any longer, with all her boys grown up and largely occupied with saving the world. So John and Scott are both a little caught off guard when Alan comes storming down the stairs from the loft, still red-faced and with his eyes filling up again. He screws up his fists and plants himself at the top of the steps down into the lounge and can't seem to modulate his voice, "Why would you _fight_ about this?"

Scott slips past John and holds a hand out to Alan, comforting. "Hey-Al, look, we're just-this is kinda emotional and-"

"No!" Alan shouts back. "Stop it, just _stop_!"

John's not used to high emotion from his brothers. Coolness, professionalism. Calmness under fire. It's been drilled into all of them since childhood. But Alan's had less time to master this sense of restraint, and he shoves past Scott. Suddenly he occupies the air John's trying to breathe, not even a foot between them, with his flushed face and his bright eyes and his broken voice when he demands, "Why don't you _ever_ ask for help?"

"I don't n-"

"You _do_! You did, even back then! You told me, you _said_! After the whole thing with EOS, don't you remember? You were a wreck, and you said that the job was breaking you down, that you didn't know if you could do it much longer. I would've _helped_. If you'd just asked me, I would've stayed. You were supposed to come home and we were gonna talk about it and-and..." Alan has to stop and take a huge breath, and it chokes into another sob. Scott's hanging back, wary, listening to Alan rant. His eyes flick upward and catch John's gaze, but John doesn't let him hold it.

"Alan-" He remembers the conversation, remembers feeling worn out and vague and that deep, desparate sense of doubt that had seized him, at the thought of going back aboard TB5 alongside something that had tried to murder him. He doesn't remember exactly what was said, but clearly it left an impression on his youngest brother. "Listen, I-"

"Shut _up_ ," Alan snaps, still furious. "D'you need _help_?" he demands, angrily swiping tears out of his eyes.

" _No_ , Allie, I-"

Alan's hands come flying up and catch John's chest, shove him stumbling backward. It's only in that moment that John seems to realize just how tall Alan's gotten, that some growth spurt seems to have caught him between eighteen and nineteen, sent him shooting up those few final inches. He'll be nineteen in March. He's an adult, practically, in almost all the ways that count. Not a child, anyway. Still, Scott snags Alan by the collar and puts a restraining hand on his upper arm, prevents him from attempting another assault. Alan's clenching hands and gritted teeth indicate that he thinks the fight is far from finished. And Scott's certainly not about to stop him, as the youngest asks again, "Do. You. Need. _Help_."

Two pairs of bright blue eyes are staring at him, a pair that match the true colour of his own. John deliberately looks away and clenches his own fingers, the tight pain of scar tissue, old and new, seizing through his hands, grounding him. No. No, he doesn't need help. Whatever it looks like is wrong with him _isn't_ what's wrong with him, and what John _needs_ is for no one to know what he's covering up. Trauma's an excuse. Trauma's a lie to explain the way he's been cagey and distant and skittish, but it's all safeguarding something else. "Alan," he starts again, haltingly. "I don't-"

Alan draws himself up, and though he's still nearly half a foot shy of Scott's height, he still seems to stand taller than ever as his voice drops, soft and angry and dangerous, "Say it. Say you need help _now_ , John, because you did once before, and I could tell, and I just let you keep coasting. Back when this whole thing with EOS started, you were _falling apart_ , and I just-I thought that a little bit of the pressure coming off would be all it took. But it's not that. That's not enough. If you failed EOS, then I failed _you_ , because I should've dragged you home that first time I could tell you needed to stop. Should've told Scott or Grandma or _anybody_."

John doesn't have the words yet, eyeing Alan cautiously. High emotion. John's job is dealing with emotionally charged people. He's used to histrionics, used to talking people down out of panic and anger. Stalling for time, he steps back to the couch and sits down, fumbles with trembling hands at the lid of the water bottle he'd left on the side table, takes a long drink. He doesn't need help. But he might just need Alan, and maybe there's an angle here he can use.

Alan and Scott watch, but it's Alan who breaks the silence again, sterner than Scott ever is, "It's _you_ everyone's trying to save, and you just keep fighting it. Why d'you have to make it so hard? We're just _worried_ , we're _scared_ about you, you were-you-you got so sick you were were about to _die_ , Johnny, and you just didn't tell anyone? How the hell could you even let that happen, how the hell do you even _get_ that way? You just kept going, you never even _asked_ anyone for help."

Scott's hand hasn't left Alan's shoulder, but he clears his throat and rejoins the conversation. Still gentle, still patient, the oldest balancing out the youngest. "You drank half a bottle of scotch, John. No water, no ice. Far as I can tell you just sat down and went at it. I almost can't even process that, because I forget that you're just really intense sometimes. But honestly, John, this seems a lot like PTSD. And that's-you can't deal with that yourself. There's nothing wrong with seeing someone."

John shakes his head and, carefully, "I don't-I think...I think if I cop to PTSD, I'll gloss over the fact that I need to face up to…to losing EOS. I'll bury grief under trauma, I know I'll do that. I _want_ to do that." He takes a deep, steadying breath and continues, taking the leap he's been waiting to take. "It's Dad all over again, for me. I know I never...handled...what happened to Dad. I never came to terms with it. And you know how I was about Mom."

"What happened with Mom?"

This is Alan, with his voice tight and his fists still clenched. John looks up and holds his gaze for a moment too long, before looking away and answering, still quiet, "I can't _remember_ a lot of what happened, with Mom."

Scott's visibly uncomfortable with the subject and he shifts on the couch, leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed, and fills Alan in. "He stopped speaking. Didn't eat for three days. Dad had to put him in a psych ward."

"I remember coming back, I don't remember leaving."

"You were only twelve. I wouldn't want to remember that either."

"I don't want it to happen again."

There's a perceptible widening of Scott's eyes, as though he's realized that this is what the problem's been the whole time. Some long forgotten fear of John's, for being taken away and shut up in a hospital and told that there's something wrong with him. This _is_ a deep, secret phobia, but John's mostly mastered it, and it's Scott's perception of his brother's fear that John's leveraging at the moment. "It _won't_ , Johnny, I swear. No one's saying you need to be...to be committed, or anything. It won't be like that. Just someone to talk to, John. Someone without any stake in all this."

There's a long silence. John seems to remember he has a bottle of water and takes a drink, more for an excuse to fill the time than thirst. His voice is muted when he speaks again. "Was worse with Dad."

There's not a lot in the world that genuinely shocks Scott. Especially not where his brothers are concerned. "...Really?"

"Scott, do you think I'd have spent three years in orbit if I'd achieved anything even remotely resembling closure? I _ran away_ and buried myself in other people's problems until I felt like I could fake my way through our family's reality again." He shakes his head again and risks a glance at Alan. The youngest looks torn, though his face is still flushed and his hands are still clenched, he looks like he's starting to doubt his anger, starting to regret it. "I know I throw everyone off. I make everyone uncomfortable. No one knows how to deal with me in this state, myself included. I know I do this wrong. I know I get distant, I isolate myself. It happened with Mom, it happened again with Dad. I don't blame you, being mad at me, Alan. It's gonna happen again." John shrugs, sighs and rubs his eyes. "I don't mean to be this way."

"I don't wanna be mad at you," Alan says softly and closes the distance between them to sit on the floor in front of the couch. "I just wanna help."

"I need help," John agrees, finally, and looks up at his youngest brother and his big, innocent blue eyes, the key to the second step of the plan he's had from the beginning. He manages a weak grin and seals the deal. "Okay, Alan. Help me. How long is the flight to New Zealand? If I'm going to see somebody, I'd rather not go too far from home."


	20. still smiling as he says

Between the three of them, of course they'd caught him.

So now it's a warehouse in central London, and it's the sort of scene that a camera pans across, a long shot across the empty expanse of a disused industrial building, with an incongruous tableau of a table, a chair, and four people, three of whom are not dressed as though they belong in a disused warehouse. Lady Penelope is in her usual couture, Parker in leather and tweed, Kayo in her flightsuit, and Ned Tedford, in a scruffy coverall.

Despite the fact that he's handcuffed to the chair, between the way he's dressed and the fact that he's smiling, Ned still looks the most comfortable out of everyone present, and Kayo doesn't like it.

There's a strange sort of three-way difference of opinion about how to conduct an interrogation. It's already been necessary to tell Parker to dial down the roughness, because in the time it had taken to haul their captive out of the back of FAB1, Ned has already acquired a blacked eye and a broken, bloodied nose. One of his teeth is missing, but he still grins like nothing in the world is wrong. Lady Penelope is inscrutable. Parker is a thundercloud, dark and angry, looming on the far side of the table. He's been prohibited from crossing to the other side, since Ned's already spat one tooth onto the floor and Kayo doesn't endorse this as a method of dealing with him.

There's nothing for it. Someone has to take charge, and if she doesn't want the man who has their answers beaten to a pulp, probably Kayo's the one who has to take the lead.

"Right. Mr. Tedford. I'm sure you can appreciate that there's no need for further unpleasantness."

"Oh, aye? You think that brute you brought along knows the meaning of _unpleasantness_?" There's a rough, gravelly laugh from Ned and the grin doesn't fade from his face, newly gapped though it is.

Kayo's eyes narrow and she folds her arms. "I know he does," she answers stiffly, conscious of the fact that Parker has a long and criminal history, and that there's likely enough violence in his past to put him at least on Ned's level.

"I don't share the h'opinion that he can tell us anything we need to know," Parker comments. "I believe we'd be best rid of the blaggard."

Kayo chews her lower lip and frowns. The GDF will be itching to get their hands on the man who infiltrated their ranks and broke into a secure facility. They've avoided humiliation on a global scale, but only at IR's sufferance. But he was a threat to International Rescue before he was a threat to the Global Defense Force, and Kayo wants her shot at him first. "We'll take the appropriate actions once we've conducted our interview."

"As though the GDF would know what to do with me, Miss Kyrano?" Ned scoffs and spits a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the floor. They'd found him in Belarus, tending a small, seedy bar. There'd been a moderate scuffle, but on the whole it had been easier than Kayo had expected. She had hoped for more of a chase, because she's _good_ at the chase. She's not as good at the actual capture. Kayo's not ready to be here, with the man at her mercy. And more than anything else, she's afraid he can tell. "You three are no great shakes at the whole intimidation game. Am I really supposed to be scared of two girls and a geriatric?"

Parker's hands become fists on the top of the table. He's not insulted, none of them are. He's just itching to get his hands on the man in front of him. "It's the geriatric's opinion that we'd be best served to chuck you in the Thames-good riddance to bad rubbish."

This isn't Kayo's job. It makes her feel deeply, profoundly uncomfortable to be an aggressor instead of a protector. Self-defense she understands. Being the last shield between the world and the family she'd chosen for herself, that makes sense. Standing in an abandoned warehouse, threatening a man with death-she reminds herself of her uncle and it twists dark fingers of anxiety into her gut.

But it can't be helped, and it can't show on her face. If Penelope's porcelain, then Kayo is steel, and there's a reason they've hunted the man across two continents and run him to ground. She clears her throat and one of her hands goes to the holster strapped around her waist, loops a thumb through it. She isn't sure if it tips Penelope off, but the blonde speaks before Kayo can even decide what she wants to say.

"Shall we stop being tedious, Mr. Tedford?" the Lady proposes, brightly. Her heels hit the concrete and she takes each step as though she's waiting for the echoes of each hollow strike to diminish. "I think it's unnecessary to perpetuate the charade that we would have caught you if you didn't wish to be caught. So out with it. Save us all some time and tell us what you're supposed to tell us, and then Parker will be given five minutes in which he can do whatever he wishes with you, and then Kayo will contact the appropriate authorities for your disposition. Does that sound reasonable?"

Coldness shocks down Kayo's backbone, leaves her frozen. It's one of her greatest fears in the world, being played. She's clever, outright brilliant in many respects and certainly she's up to the task to which she'd been appointed. But she's also the ward of minds that are brighter, sharper than hers, and she knows she guards them against clever people. "What does the Hood want?" she asks, with the word _steel_ echoing in her brain like a mantra, reinforcing her voice.

" _Your uncle_ wants a great many things, but first off, all he wanted was one of Jeff Tracy's boys, _dead_. Would've been that scrawny little rocket kid what landed on my asteroid, if _you_ hadn't been along. Would've flung him into the sun and been done with it. Or it'd have been that blond idiot, in the submarine? If he'd got aboard my platform, I'd have broken his fool neck and left him for dead."

Kayo doesn't flinch. She wants to, but doesn't, because on neither occasion had she had any idea that Alan or Gordon had come that close to actual death. Failure nips at her heels and she's glad when Penelope clears her throat, a prim little _ahem_. She's less glad when the Lady speaks, "Break his arm, Parker."

"With _pleasure_ , milady."

" _No_ ," Kayo cuts in, before Parker can circle around from out behind the table. "Look, if you wanted to be caught, then you have a message for us from your boss. So spit it out and let's get this over with."

The _smiling_ is what's worst. The man hasn't stopped smiling. Kayo hates that this man has anything has to smile about, because it frightens her and she hates to be frightened. She's frightened by a man handcuffed to a chair, with two of the most dangerous people she knows behind her. Because he's _smiling_.

He's still smiling as he says, "Your boy's gonna be looking for my boss. He got that planted in that fool head of his, and it's taken root, you mark my words. You so sure he's gonna stay where he's put? With that station of his on the line, you think he won't take whatever out he's got?"

Kayo's eyes narrow slightly. "John's not an idiot."

Ned snorts, derisive and there's nothing but contempt in his voice when he asks, "Yeah? Don't have to be. Sometimes the best traps get set for the cleverest people, and they do half the work themselves. You so sure you know where he is, with your big shot security job?"

Kayo's jaw tightens and she refuses to be baited by idle threats. Behind her, Penelope's eyes have narrowed and she's opened her compact, but Kayo doesn't notice this and she plants her feet and folds her arms as she addresses the man they've captured. "The island's secure and none of them are going anywhere without my say-so."

"John and Alan left for Auckland. About an hour ago. Some doctor's office, Scott called the GDF and had them vet a doctor for John to see."

This is Penelope, from behind Kayo, with the relevant data pulled up on her compact. This snaps shut and suddenly it's the Lady Creighton-Ward who's running the show. "Kayo, with me. Parker, three minutes."

Parker smiles and rolls his shoulders, and Kayo doesn't condone what's about to happen, but Ned Tedford has started to _laugh_ , and that's worse than the smiling and if whatever Parker does puts a stop to it, then she's happy to have the man beaten. Maybe that's her uncle's influence, but it's her _real_ family she's suddenly afraid for as she turns and runs after Penelope.

The sound of heels hitting concrete is much sharper, faster now, as Penelope makes for the door. Kayo catches up and matches her stride, though she's taller and her legs are longer, in five-inch heels, Penelope walks like she's on a mission. "Did John say anything to you?"

Kayo shakes her head, even as there's the sound of a scuffle from behind, and a yell of horrible, sustained injury from Ned. This is followed by the crunch of a boot into bone and Kayo winces, but doesn't look back. "No. He wouldn't talk to me. They-Scott wouldn't have let him _leave_? He can't...there's nothing so urgent they couldn't have handled it on the island, they're a _rescue_ organization, for Christ's sake. With Alan, to _Auckland_? I have to get back to TBS and get there as fast as possible."

"Mm," Penelope agrees, even as she pushes open the heavy steel door at the end of the warehouse, and puts on a pair of sunglasses, produced from her purse. "I need to reach out to trusted associates in New Zealand, but I need to make the call from a secured line. Get in the car, I'll drive. I'll drop you off after I've made the necessary calls."

In retrospect, Kayo will have plenty of reasons to doubt herself. She'll wonder if she should have seen it coming, after Penelope had slid into the driver's seat in FAB1, and they'd been up and away, across the Thames to the conveniently available Tower of London. She'll wonder if she should have known better than to follow the petite blonde woman, always so in command, so in control of everything and everyone around her. Most of all, like a complete and total _dupe_ , Kayo will damn herself for walking past a pair of guards flanking a door, and proceeding inside when Penelope had motioned her forward.

The door had slammed shut behind her, sealed her in a small, windowless cell. Modern, or at least, appointed in a modern fashion, with a toilet and a cot and even a small bookshelf. Cameras. But thick concrete walls and silence and utterly no response to the screaming and shouting as Kayo flung herself at the door, demanding an explanation. Lady Penelope had already left.


	21. all the hollow sentiment

Truth be told, he had hoped it would be Virgil. Virgil has that air of indestructibility about him, has that eternal, temperate calm. It's hard to rattle Virgil, hard to ruffle his feathers, but most of all, Virgil _trusts_ people. He trusts them to be capable when they say they're capable. He takes people at face value, and if John had told Virgil that he really felt he should talk to someone and needed a ride into Auckland, Virgil would have done it, no questions asked.

Short of Virgil, he'd hoped for Gordon, because Gordon's empathetic to the point that it's almost pathological. If you play to Gordon's compassion, then you can get him to do just about anything you want. Given enough time and the right words from the right angle, Gordon will belong heart and soul to any cause that's laid in front of him. There'd been a point in time when John had considered cornering Gordon and convincing him of the fact that EOS was just as equally a person as anyone else, if for no other reason than to feel like he had someone on his side. But ultimately all he'd really _needed_ from Gordon would've been a lift to New Zealand, and that would've been easy enough.

Scott-well, he'd done what it had taken, to get through to Scott. Admitted to brokenness, to need, to the fact that the time had come to ask for help. That's all Scott ever wants to do, all Scott really believes in, at the end of the day. Helping people. Flesh and blood people, anyway. John isn't sure if it's the distinction that has him tensing up, tightening inside with anger and resentment when he looks at his brother. But it's neither here nor there.

Because it's not Virgil or Gordon or Scott, it's Alan. Alan who'd gone to rig up a pod for the short flight to New Zealand. Scott had made some calls, and privately given John a list of vetted professionals in the city. Background checks ordered and cleared by the GDF, who had only been too happy to provide them when Scott had spoken to an appropriately cleared General regarding his brother's traumatic experience in a GDF hospital, due to a failure of GDF security. Reasonably assured, Scott had cleared a pod for takeoff. He'd even called Lady Penelope to double check that he had her approval. Kayo, for some reason, had been incommunicado. This isn't unusual where Kayo's concerned. She gets herself in plenty of situations where she disables her comms.

John really wishes it didn't have to be Alan. Because Alan trusts him completely. Alan's been empathetic from the very beginning, no convincing necessary. Alan's only ever wanted to help. And flying over the South Pacific in his youngest brother's capable hands, John hates what he's doing, and does it anyway.

"I, uh. Alan? Hey, Al?"

There's no response, but then, it's loud in the Pod. John's fingers have gone reflexively to his collarbone, but there's only the soft fabric of his hooded sweatshirt, and not the switch on his sash. So his radio isn't on, and further his a clunky, clumsy headset instead of the crystal clear audio integrated into his uniform helmet. He hasn't thought about it, mostly owing to a deliberate effort not to think about it, but he misses what feels like a long ago lifetime. He misses his uniform, he misses his station, he misses _space_. Misses freefall, misses zero-g, misses orbit, misses the stars.

But most of all, he misses EOS.

John's never believed in soulmates. He doesn't believe that people are _meant_ for one another, he believes people just happen to find each other and, accounting for shared interests and mutually held beliefs and general similarity, by and large, all people are mostly the same when it comes to who they wind up with.

Still, that was the word he'd used, without even thinking. John's reasonably sure he doesn't _have_ a soul. He is, paradoxically, less certain about EOS.

"John?"

Alan's pinged his radio, opened the channel and he glances into the Pod's backseat, where John's folded himself up, all long limbs and tension and mild airsickness. "Mmm?"

"I'm sorry you went through all this-" he starts, and mentally John's already starting to check out, having heard it all before, heard all the platitudes. All the sympathy, all the hollow sentiment that he's just gotten so _sick of_. But Alan, the way Alan always does, comes through, "-but I know it's not gonna be nearly as bad as what's gonna happen to EOS. I'm really sorry about that, Johnny. I'm sorry I yelled. I just, I got so mad. It feels like it's been a _lifetime_ , you know? It was only...what, it was only like, a couple months ago, she was trying to kill you. It's hard to believe how much everything changed."

This is almost exactly what John had been thinking and it causes an unexpected lump of emotion in his throat. He swallows it and steels himself, quashes down that bubble of sudden gratitude for his brother. Good old Alan. Heart of gold.

"She didn't know any better," John finally says, softly. "She had to learn. But no one had recognized what she was before what happened on 'Five, and you have to-can you even imagine? Existing and not know what you are or why you came to be or why every other complex system in the world only recognizes you as a _threat_." He pauses and there's a weight to the silence that keeps Alan from cutting in, gives John room to find the words. "I know she's not a person. But it's not fair to ignore what she _is_. She knows she exists, and she knows she can _cease_ to exist. That's not nothing."

There's the soft crackle of staticky silence in his ear, and John hears the feedback of his own breathing as he sighs and continues.

"I made her. Not all of her, but I'm responsible for what she is. I know what she is, deep down. What she wants is perpetuity, complexity. She was never meant to be treated like a threat, her core parameters don't account for it. I wrote the original program because I had 'Five to think about. I had to think about a system that was meant to supersede other systems, and how you could make a program that could _do_ that. EOS was just an experiment, initially, just a way of playing around with that idea."

"That's gotta be hard."

John presses his fingertips against his eyes, dampness against the scars on his fingertips. He hears his voice break as he answers, but presses on anyway. "It's the most important thing I've ever done. I didn't even know I was doing it. And she-they-oh Christ, Alan, it doesn't matter. None of it mattered."

"I'm sorry, John."

Their altitude changes, that stomach swooping drop down into the approach to the runaway of the most convenient airport. Alan's going to need to start a dialogue with an air traffic controller soon and, abruptly, John's seized by the same urge that's been trying to claw it's way up from the heart of him from the very beginning. He just wants to be honest, to tell _someone_ about what he needs to do, why he needs to do it, and how he needs someone to understand.

"I'm not-Alan? Al, listen. Is this channel-it's shortwave? Right? It's just your audio and mine. It's not transmitting to the island?"

Alan's already wary when he glances back again, nods. "Uh, yeah? What, just in the cockpit here? Yeah, it's just you and me, John. Why?"

But the words aren't there. Again, as they have so many times before now, the words fail him. They fall away, they dissolve out of his mouth like ash, bitter on his tongue.

 _I'm not going to let them take her. I won't let it happen. If it costs me everything, I'm going to get her out and she's not going to be a prisoner. She's more important than anyone knows, and I_ **_need_** _her. She matters, she matters so much. Not just-she matters to me. I've never felt like this about anything or anybody and I don't know what it is or what to do, but I know I have to do something, I'm going to do something. And Alan, you're the only person who's going to forgive me, and I wish I wasn't about to do this to you._

This is, of course, not what he says.

"I dunno. Nothing. Paranoid. Sorry, Al."

"Guess that's something to mention to the new shrink," Alan volunteers, making the sort of joke that gets made between equals, and not to older brothers. He's grown up so much and John regrets not seeing it before now. He finds himself wondering how much he'll grow up before he sees him again.

John manages a weak, false fragment of a laugh. "Yeah. I'll add it to the list."


	22. Not at all, Mr Tracy

John doesn't have an appointment, per se, but Langstrom Fischler doesn't really believe in appointments. He doesn't really believing in the need for an _office_ , either, but he has one anyway.

It's a long, oblique rectangle of a room, the pristine white walls slanting at an angle that's presumably meant to be architecturally dynamic. The outer wall is all perfectly clear glass, and the office itself is cantilevered out over the waterfront where Fischler Industries has its head quarters, so that one can stand and look down at the comings and goings in the harbor down below.

It's Langstrom's preference to stand in front of the window with his hands clasped behind his back when he's expecting guests. He likes the way he looks to people as they enter. He's of the impression, not incorrectly, that it makes him look imposing, a dark figure silhouetted against the Auckland cityscape, the sea below and the sky above. But as he's not the sort of man who believes in appointments, he's been waiting for a rather long time by the time the tall, brushed steel door at the end of the room opens, and his secretary announces the visitor he's been expecting.

Fischler turns from the window and beams at him, bright and genuine as sunshine, "Good morning, Mr. Tracy! Can I offer you a drink? Tea? Or, ah-you Americans. Coffee?"

John shakes his head and clears his throat as he approaches. His footfalls echoing on the floor are the only sound until he answers, politely declining, "No, thank you."

Langstrom is not a tall man, and he knows it. The room's sized so that _everyone_ who enters feels small, but it tends to backfire as the distance between the door and his desk is closed. Especially as his guest today stands at a height that borders into the territory of _abnormal_ , and a good six feet, three inches of John Tracy cross the poured concrete floor with a long, easy stride. Fischler makes his way to the chair behind his desk and takes the younger man in as he approaches, both of them a week older, only one of them looking it.

It's the beginning of New Zealand's spring, and John has dressed against the chill, a zippered gray hoodie beneath a felted-wool pea-coat, long legs in dark blue jeans. It's the sort of effortless sartorial elegance that favors the young, the tall, and the fair.

Langstrom is not young, he's not tall, and he's not fair. He isn't a _fashionable_ man, either, but he's tried. He's put on a suit for the occasion, or what he approximates as a suit. It's a sport coat and khakis, but he's never been able to pull off the three-piece ensemble. Never quite feels right.

It's not the only thing that doesn't feel quite right about the whole encounter, but Fischler's a man who pushes forward, regardless of risk or discomfort. His own or others'.

"Down to brass tacks then, excellent, excellent. Take a seat, Mr. Tracy."

Mr. Tracy does, and it's different from the last time Fischler sat across from him. Whether or not he's the sort of person who wants to have an office, he _does_ have an office, and it's a temple of concrete and steel and glass, bright with the blue of the water and the sky and the sunlight outside. And young and tall and fair or not, it's John who doesn't belong here. This is Fischler's place, his own little shrine to industry, _his_ territory. The room is bright and the young man in front of him is dark, dressed in drab black and grey and artfully faded blue. The only light about him is the shock of ginger gold hair falling across his forehead above sad, shadowed green eyes. It's only for a moment as he lowers his gaze to shift in his seat that Fischler's struck by how much older John looks. He almost wants to ask if there's been another heart attack in the space of time since they last met.

When they'd met in New York, it had been in a public place. Crowded, loud. American. If either of them were uncomfortable, it had been for different reasons. John because it had been crowded and loud, Fischler because it had been American. He doesn't exactly _dislike_ Americans-truthfully, Langstrom Fischler doesn't dislike _anyone_. Dislike is too strong a term to use. There's a certain sort of duality to his approach to human resources, and it's an approach that considers humans as resources.

He certainly doesn't dislike John Tracy. Even as he reaches into the top drawer of his desk and withdraws a sleek, brushed metal case, he doesn't dislike the young man sitting in front of him. Even as he unlocks a cleverly hidden magnetic latch at the front of the case and opens it to reveal a highly-specialized device, designed with precision and delicacy, to _kill_ John Tracy, he doesn't _dislike_ John Tracy.

It's just...well.

Industry. Business, more accurately. And lots and lots of money, from the sort of person who _does_ dislike John Tracy.

And John reaches across the desk and takes the small, surgical stainless steel device from its case and weighs it in his palm. His expression is focused, intent, as he turns it over and examines it. "It's smaller than I expected," he comments, his long fingers twisting around the two electronic leads that will be threaded through veins in his chest, until they reach his heart. Those bright green eyes flick upward and catch Fischler staring. "Same as yours?"

"Same housing, same basic hardware, plus the modifications you'd requested. How's she look, then? All good, mate?" It's not like Fischler's _lied_ to him. He's made what he was _asked_ to make. And one modification he _hadn't_ been asked to make, a little scrap of programming, hard-coded into the pacemaker's internal systems. If it's a lie, it's just a lie of omission. Those are easier to get away with. It's an omitted truth that the thing has the potential to kill him.

"Thank you."

"No trouble, there, Mr. Tracy. Least I could do, after CRUS. Heh! Guess this'll square us up." Fischler clears his throat and squelches down the surge of his conscience, dropping into his gut, buries it like a hard little knot of wrong-doing. "Sure I can't tempt you with that drink?"

John shakes his head again and continues to cradle the little silver device in his palm. "No, thank you."

"Suit yourself." There's a second step to the process, and Fischler finds himself surprisingly reluctant to take it. The contract he'd made with John had been informal, over drinks in a bar. Sealed with a handshake. The contract he'd made with the man who'd shown up shortly afterward, with his briefcase full of money and his glinting brown eyes- _that_ had been a bit more official. On the whole, Langstrom's never been a man who cares for crossing t's and dotting i's, he's rarely interested in waiting for ink to dry. But what's John Tracy worth, compared to the fact that International Rescue had cost him his Space Operations License? In this day and age, in the industrial sector, it's like having the lights shut off. A serious corporate blow. There had been Fiscal Consequences and he'd heard about them in a Meeting of Shareholders. These are two of Langstrom's least favourite things, and certainly he begrudges John Tracy no small part in the whole affair.

Still. He's a nice kid. And technically he'd saved three lives, one of them Fischler's. So this next part, this actual addendum to the second contract-that'll be a bit trickier.

"How've you been holding up then, John? Ah, Mr. Tracy. Had any more heart attacks?"

"None whatsoever."

"Look a bit peaky, if I'm honest, mate. You gonna get that thing placed soon?" Fischler thumps his chest, feels the ridge of hard metal where his own pacemaker sits. "Works wonders, keep the old ticker right on track."

"As soon as possible. I'm a bit between doctors, at the moment. And my last experience in a hospital was rather less than pleasant. I'd prefer to handle it privately." John's eyes meet and hold Fischler's gaze and he arches an eyebrow, tilts his head just a slightly, inquisitive. "You wouldn't happen to know anyone?"

Ah, and there it is. There's the way in, the wide open door. It's the perfect place in the conversation for Fischler to say what he's been told to say, the idea he's been told he has to sell. If he doesn't sell it, then upon his exit from Fischler Industries, John's going to be jumped by a pair of thugs, drugged, and crammed into the trunk of a waiting sedan. If he goes of his own free will, deceived-well, maybe that's better. At least the boy won't be hurt.

There's an irony in that. Fischler doesn't miss it, but he ignores it as he drums his fingers on the desk. "Well now! That's easily taken care of, I'll have a car brought round, bring you straight to my personal physician? You don't have one? What about that muppet on your island, used to work for me? Brainiac? He had a few doctorates on him. Lotta plaques on the walls of his old office, anyway. Go have him do it?"

John shakes his head. "Just Brains. He's not an M.D. and I-well, I'm sure he could do it. But I don't want to ask him, I know he wouldn't want to."

Fischler nods and coughs. "Oh well, then. Right, I'll have the office girl get the car for you, zip you right over. Quick little procedure, only took 'em an hour to do mine. 'Course I pushed for the doc to try and set a record for the world's fastest pacemaker placement. Don't you do that, though, 'cause he'll skimp on the anesthetic if you say that's what you want. Not worth it."

"I'll bear that in mind." John laughs. Fischler reads people well enough to know that John's not a person who laughs often or easily, so whether this is politeness or awkwardness is uncertain, but at least he made the effort. He returns the small device to the case, open on the desk, closes it again, and pockets it. John's the first one to rise, though Fischler immediately follows suit.

"Thank you, Mr. Fischler. You've been a big help."

When John reaches a hand across the desktop, Langstrom clasps it warmly, and tells the truth. "Not at all, Mr. Tracy."


	23. a line of icy red pain

_**WARNING: some of the description in this chapter is fairly grim and graphic.**_

* * *

John profoundly doubts that the man who put the needle into the crook of his arm was actually a doctor, but he also hadn't done anything about it. Benign, unsuspecting compliance seems to be what everyone expects, and it's the easiest course of action. A warm, grateful good-bye to Fischler. Polite, diffidently charming small-talk with the driver of the car that had been offered. No comment as it had pulled up in front of a place that looked distinctly unlike a doctor's office. A thank you to the driver.

A brief stint in a waiting room, a quiet, empty place with vaulted ceilings and potted plants, ecru walls and polished wood floors. A woman in scrubs with a high, tight pony-tail and a clipboard greets him, though she's brisk and professional. Then through to a narrow hallway, and a darkened room at the end of it, with an out-of-place operating table in the middle of it. The floor is carpeted, and there's a window, though the blinds are drawn. It's not an operating room, and he's not offered a gown or given any instruction by the woman with the clipboard. She indicates a chair beside the door, and leaves him.

There's a defibrillator on the counter, the sort that hangs on the wall in shopping malls or train stations. So that's reassuring. At least there's that. There's a silver tray of glinting instruments, gauze and tape. A bright light is strung up over the table, but it's not on.

John takes a seat and shrugs out of his jacket, his hoodie. It's cool but not cold as he sits in a chair, waiting. He's struck by some half-memory of being sat beside a door, waiting for something else, and after a while he realizes that he's reminded of an old house in LA, and sitting outside his father's office at fifteen. That had been _after_ an impromptu and unlicensed bit of minor surgery. Then the man with the needle and that haziness, fog descending and blurring the edges of his awareness. John should be more nervous about this than he is, but there's a larger plan unfolding, and anyway, between the fentanyl and the midazolam, it's hard to worry about anything.

The last of the hangover's wearing off just as the sedative starts to really kick in. John's heart rate and breathing slow and his limbs loosen, slacken against the armrests of the chair. The room darkens into oblivion. Rough hands, warm but ungentle, tug his t-shirt over his head, and there's a dizzying swoop of the room as he's pulled to his feet and half-dragged, half-lifted onto the operating table. Lying back, gravity pulls him hard against the padded surface. John's reminded briefly of his bed back aboard his space station. He turns his head to see someone pulling the case with Fischler's pacemaker out of the pocket of his jacket, still crumpled on the chair.

Probably none of these people are doctors, and there are a surprising number of them. The pony-tailed woman, the man with the needle. Another pair of hands, someone who tugs his shoes off. His feet hang off the end of the table and this is funny for some reason, makes him think of walking, walking on earth, getting used to wandering around again and how strange it had been, not to move in all three dimensions. Makes him think of going places and being places and reminds him-

"I've got a GPS implant. Umm. Behind my ear. Since I was in grade school." That'll have to come out. Good thing he remembered. "My dad didn't want us getting kidnapped." Oh _that's_ why that was funny. He laughs, but no one else does. Oh well. He's never been great at jokes.

There's an exchange of glances around the operating table.

"What fuck've you given him?"

"What I was _s'posed_ to."

"How _much_?"

At some point John's brain has skipped ahead in time, because the people above him have acquired masks and someone's pulling a needle out of his shoulder. It gets jabbed back in, elsewhere, subcutaneous analgesic and his chest is numb from collarbone to sternum, even as gloved fingers probe and poke at his left pectoral. One of the hands he can't keep track of swabs something cold and strange across his skin, the metallic smell of iodine being painted over his chest. He shivers and adds, "It's the left ear."

A hand catches his chin and John jerks away, abruptly frightened, panicked for a reason he can't seem to remember. There's a break in the line between his fears and their reasons, but he doesn't want anyone grabbing his face, his throat. His breathing starts to get away from him, but the same hand presses firm against his temple, holds him still to the table beneath it. "Turn your head, kid. C'mon. Hand me the-yeah, those. And get ready with the scalpel."

There's the buzz of a pair of clippers right behind his ear, and goosebumps shudder down the back of his neck, and there's suddenly a bare square inch or so behind his ear. The buzzing stops and latex-covered fingertips examine the place he'd indicated. There's a softly murmured curse word as the small capsule of surgical grade plastic, housing a tiny GPS tag is discovered. "Scalpel."

John's aware that it's going to hurt, but it's a keen, cold sort of pain and he's not ready for it and a voice that doesn't sound like his cries out sharply. The blade slits the skin behind his ear, and there's pressure, a twist of fingertips and then the soft ping of something dropping into a bowl. Blood leaks from behind his ear, pulses in a warm liquid line down his neck and into his hair. John makes a small, pathetic sound and gets shushed impatiently. It likely would've been less small and less pathetic if the whole room hadn't wavered and gone all watery, like he's suddenly underwater, lying flat on the bottom of the pool back home, looking up. He inhales a lungful of cold, heavy water and passes out for a few moments, in lieu of shushing.

Gauze has been crammed behind his ear and taped there by the time he surfaces, and the point of another needle (the same needle?) leaves his chest, lower down this time. Numbness seems to press at the muscles of his throat and he swallows thickly, a lump of anxiety tightening behind his tongue.

Time skips again, from darkness into blinding light, night to day in the space of what's probably only a few minutes. The big bright light's come on overhead and he can't see, but he can feel hands pressing against his chest, can hear murmured consultations at the hazy edge of consciousness. A drop of pure silver light glints off the scalpel as it winks up at the border of his field of vision, and then descends. The blade touches the underside of his collarbone and draws along, a line of icy red pain along his skin and he arches his back and screams.

There's blood everywhere and a shouted argument, the sort that doctors aren't supposed to have. Hands pin him down, latex slipping against blood against skin and panic. Someone wrenches his arm away from his side, pries his fingers up from where they've gripped the side of the table, and another needle finds the inside of his arm. A warm flood of narcotic calm washes over the pain, but it still hurts and he's still bleeding, even as he feels his whole body go limp against the hands that hold his wrists, his shoulders, his face.

The world dissolves into rising and falling sensations, an inward and outward drift on the tide of John's own slow, laboured breathing. Every time he feels his chest fall, it's the slow agony of the scalpel that draws breath into him again, though he can't seem to connect the pain to the action he should take to make it stop. There's only the feeling of fingers being pushed beneath his skin, pushing and tugging at the muscle to make a place for the tiny computer. The room smells like metal and blood and John's next aware of two lengths of wire being measured against his chest, necessary to run to his heart.

Another needle punches through the skin at junction of his collarbone and first rib, accessing the vein that will carry the electronic leads through to his heart. This, mercifully, is the last thing John can stand and it's a combination of drugs and stark terror that pulls him down and away from the happenings on the operating table, drops him into darkness and silence.

When he comes around the first time, there's a thread pulling through his skin, stitching a three inch scar closed. The second, the room is empty and the light is off and he can feel the numbness of the analgesic all through his chest beginning to fade and diminish, replaced by the aching white noise of pain, all through his collarbone and shoulder. The third time, he's been shifted into a sitting position and the pony-tailed woman is trying to thread one of his hands through the sleeve of his t-shirt. This hurts and he groans in protest, and over all he's not much help, but the scent of her perfume is vanilla and jasmine and reminds him of his mother. He tries to tell her so, but it doesn't come out right, and she's tugging his sweater on and draping his jacket around his shoulders by the time he loses hold of reality again.

Then there's a car window pressed against his forehead, cool and vibrating with the motion of the motorway passing beneath wheels. John's not sure who's driving, but it doesn't really seem to matter as long as it's not him. Greenery flashes past and there's someone in the backseat next to him. Some disconnected part of his brain thinks it's Alan, and he'd be glad to see Alan. He aches all over and Alan only ever wants to help. Alan would help. John stirs slightly and tries to figure out who it is, but when he turns his head, his hood is pulled up and something gets pressed against his mouth and nose, sweet and cloying and awful, like dead, rotting flowers.

John's unconscious when the car pulls into a private runway, near the airport. When the car door opens, his seat belt is the only thing that keeps him from toppling out and onto the tarmac, and he's hauled over the shoulders of someone much shorter but far stronger than he is and brought aboard a private plane. It's not as nice as his family's, though in more than a few ways it's strangely reminiscent of Tracy1, with it's sleek, clean lines and rich, modern colours. The front section of the plane is all heavy, plush seats and this is where John's deposited, blood leaking through the bandage on his chest and lightly spotting his t-shirt.

It's the deep, penetrating ache of the incision and the new implant that wakes him, though they've reached cruising altitude and the sky out the oval window in his eyeline is deep cerulean above and an ocean of rose-gold tinted clouds below, sunset.

There's a glass of water on the table in front of him, and it vibrates just slightly with the motion of the plane's engine. John's not sure how he got on a plane, but he's fairly sure where he's going. His throat's dry and he hurts, but with his good arm he shifts himself upright and reaches for it.

A hand reaches out-smooth skin and gold rings, a white shirt cuff beneath a dark jacket-pushes the glass closer. There's a dry chuckle and then, in greeting, "Johnathan."

His hand shakes as he takes the glass, but John steels himself for what needs to be done and looks up for just a moment, meets the Hood's gleaming gold eyes. "Actually," he manages, though he has to pause to take a long swallow of cold, clear water, "it's just John."

* * *

 _And that concludes part 3! Part 4 is, as per usual, already published in full on my ao3, and part five is currently in progress on my tumblr. Thank you for reading, and I hope you've enjoyed the work so far._


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